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Alberta Just Legalized Online Gambling. Is It Ready for the Consequences?

By Rob Csernyik

Originally published on August 9, 2026 in issue 18 of Forward Weekly

In May, I attended the SBC Summit Canada gambling industry conference in Toronto as Alberta prepared to launch its new online gambling market. “iGaming” — the government’s official term for websites like FanDuel and DraftKings — was on everyone's lips. Minister of Service Alberta and Red Tape Reduction Dale Nally’s fireside chat on the topic was so popular that I had to watch it from an overflow room.

While the minister said little surprising about the forthcoming market of privately operated, government-regulated online gambling sites, one remark stood out: “I'm hearing the number’s as high as 70 operators that want to come to our market,” he said. Ontario, which has nearly three times Alberta’s population, had only a dozen operators when it launched its own iGaming industry in 2022.

According to the AGLC website, there are already 36 registered private iGaming operators, most of which have already gone live since deregulation started on July 13. The numbers signal that Alberta’s iGaming corporation isn’t cautiously dipping its toe into the pond of iGaming, but diving in head-first.

Gambling is so common in Canada that government support for iGaming in Ontario and Alberta focused less on risks than on revenue opportunities and the potential to lure players from unregulated to regulated sites. But what’s frequently left out of the conversation — and which I discuss in my forthcoming book A Losing Hand — are the range of serious human costs that result from legalized, heavily promoted gambling operations in Canada, from the lottery boom of the ’80s and spread of video lottery terminals in the ’90s to sports and online gambling sites today. These costs range from personal financial losses and bankruptcies to mental health and addiction challenges, even suicide.

There are already 36 registered private iGaming operators, most of which have already gone live since deregulation started on July 13.

In Alberta, addiction and suicide are already major public health crises. In 2024, 538 Albertans died by suicide, nearly three-quarters of them men. But the damage from problem gambling doesn't stop with the gambler. Research from Australia and England links it to domestic abuse, finding it can increase the frequency and severity of violence while exacerbating coercive control. It may also pull parents away from their children, strain household finances, and wipe out savings meant for education or retirement. 

Our understanding of how such harms affect Canadians is frequently anecdotal and reliable data in Canada is surprisingly thin. Even basic measures, such as how many people are at risk of addiction, rely on outdated surveys. The most recent large-scale survey of gamblers, from 2018, found that about 3.6 percent of Albertans had gambling problems or were at risk of developing them.

Gambling at the scale of a regulated iGaming industry is an unprecedented shift, making legal gambling as accessible as a smartphone — both more available and more heavily advertised than their predecessors like brick-and-mortar casinos. That may be especially consequential in a province where one in five people live in rural communities, or for workers in oil patch camps, where entertainment options beyond a smartphone can be limited.

To Nally’s credit, Alberta’s iGaming industry is taking some proactive steps with this ease of access in mind, like launching with a central self-exclusion registry, so players can ban themselves from all iGaming sites at once instead of having to contact sites individually. (Ontario only got one in May, four years post-launch.) And even with members of the industry sitting before him at the summit, Nally acknowledged that gambling can be harmful, taboo in such a space. If there was such a thing as “a big red button” that could be pressed to stop gambling, he said, “I would press it, but that button does not exist.” 

Potential harms from legalized gambling can take years to become noticeable in jurisdictions where the industry has recently expanded.

Nally’s public take is that creating an industry led by an ethos of player protection and full of like-minded commercial partners keeps Albertans safe. Ontario politicians make similar claims but there are already troubling signs that not all is well with the province's iGaming industry. Last December, the Investigative Journalism Foundation reported that gambling-related bankruptcies in Ontario more than quadrupled since 2021. By comparison, Alberta bankruptcies increased by 59 percent, indicating a growing problem that’s likely to get much worse.

There has also been a 144 percent spike in young men calling the ConnexOntario helpline for gambling since 2022. Such disturbing trends are the tip of the iceberg, as many remain still unknown to the public. This is partly because potential harms from legalized gambling can take years to become noticeable in jurisdictions where the industry has recently expanded. Another reason is that Ontario’s push into iGaming has not been matched with additional transparency.

It’s too late for Alberta to ease into iGaming cautiously. Instead, it will have to deal with the hand it has dealt itself by monitoring downstream effects and publishing more transparent, useful data on gambling harms than it has previously to remain accountable. It must also apply public health lessons from that data to tweak the iGaming experiment in the coming months and years. This could include taking actions like adding friction to sign-up processes, enforcing betting limits or reducing the number of licensed partners.

Alberta has the power to avoid repeating past mistakes that have jeopardized the finances, health and even lives of Canadian citizens over past decades. At every stage of gambling expansion in Canada, opposition politicians, advocates and concerned citizens warned of the potential harms. Yet no province has tracked those harms transparently or consistently enough for the public to understand the true cost. Though the number of video lottery terminals has been curbed in some Canadian regions, provinces have continued to expand into newer, more accessible forms of gambling, rather than adopting policies that meaningfully restrict it. The result is a country awash in legal gambling but still largely in the dark about its consequences. 

Alberta can lead by example, if it chooses to. Understanding the human cost of gambling has been optional in this country for too long. In the iGaming era, it has to be table stakes.