By Alex Drummond, Editor-in-Chief · May 29, 2026 · Fact-checked by Maya Chen
VICTORIA - British Columbia's new Gaming Control Act and the Independent Gambling Control Office it creates have been in force since April 13, and a fresh policy-trade-press analysis on Thursday brought the changes back into focus for industry watchers. The headline change in Victoria's gambling architecture is structural rather than commercial: regulation is being separated from operation, money laundering enforcement is being shifted from the Ministry of Public Safety and Solicitor General to the new arm's-length office, and the fee structure that gaming facilities pay the province has been rewritten to track revenue rather than flat counts. For Canadian online poker, none of this opens up a private-operator market in British Columbia. But it does put the institutional pieces in place that would be required if Victoria ever chose to make that move, and it lines up the third-largest province in the country behind the Ontario model.
Minister of Public Safety and Solicitor General Nina Krieger introduced the changes in a December 2025 release and confirmed them with the act's commencement last month. "Money laundering is a serious issue in our province and across the country, and strong oversight is needed to prevent it," she said in the government statement. "The new act creates a strong regulatory framework so that the Independent Gambling Control Office, our new independent regulator, can more effectively address criminal activity and protect people in B.C." The IGCO replaces the Gaming Policy and Enforcement Branch that previously sat inside the ministry.
What the IGCO Actually Does
The IGCO is structured to look familiar to anyone who has read an AGCO governance document. It has a general manager who makes and enforces regulations across gambling and horse racing, with the authority to issue directives to the British Columbia Lottery Corporation without ministerial consent. That separation, of regulator and operator, is the single most consequential design choice in the new act. It mirrors the same separation the AGCO and iGaming Ontario have operated under in Ontario since the regulated market's April 2022 launch, and which became more formal in this province when the iGaming Ontario Act was proclaimed on May 12, 2025 and turned iGaming Ontario into a standalone Crown agency reporting to the Minister of Tourism, Culture and Gaming. British Columbia has now adopted the same conceptual architecture.
The IGCO's mandate covers gambling conducted and managed by the British Columbia Lottery Corporation, charitable gambling, and the horse-racing industry. It is also charged with administering Gambling Support BC, the provincial outreach and treatment program for people harmed by gambling, which transferred over with the Gaming Policy and Enforcement Branch staff. The Cullen Commission's 2022 inquiry into money laundering and the 2018 German Report each recommended creating an independent gambling regulator; the IGCO is the operationalisation of those recommendations after three and a half years of legislative drafting and consultation.
The provincial cabinet has not yet named the new office's general manager, and the regulator has not yet posted its first directive. The transitional period from the Gaming Policy and Enforcement Branch is being run with continuity-of-personnel as the operating principle. Licensees and registered service providers in British Columbia have been told that existing rules continue to apply except where the new regulations or new fee schedule explicitly change them.
The Fee Structure Mimics Ontario
The piece of the act with the most direct read-across to the iGaming model in this province is the new fee structure for gaming facility operators, which is built on percentages of revenue rather than the flat fees that had been in place for fifteen years. The Sportsline coverage by Derek Helling on Thursday noted that the new structure "mimics similar frameworks in Ontario and several US states." Casinos and bingo halls with annual gross revenue under C$100 million face fee increases of 20 per cent and 25 per cent respectively, reflecting both inflation and the administrative cost of regulation. Suppliers in the online gaming category, which in British Columbia today means the technology vendors supporting the BC Lottery Corporation's PlayNow site, will face new classes of fees that did not previously exist in the schedule.
The revenue-based design is the same conceptual approach iGaming Ontario uses with its private-operator framework, and it is the kind of fee logic that would be required if British Columbia were ever to broaden its online gaming market beyond a single Crown-operator platform. Operators that have studied potential entry into a future BC market read the fee architecture as one of several preparatory steps. None of those operators has been invited into the province in any formal way, and BC government communications have been emphatic that the current changes do not contemplate market expansion.
The Ceiling: Online Gaming Is Still PlayNow Only
The act's most important limitation, from the perspective of an Ontario online poker reader, is what it does not do. British Columbia's laws restrict all legal online gaming in the province to the BC Lottery Corporation's PlayNow site, which offers a casino product, sports betting, lottery and a small poker operation that historically has had cross-pool sharing with Loto-Québec but operates under provincial restrictions on real-money tournament structures. There is no statutory pathway, today, for a private operator to enter British Columbia. The IGCO does not change that. The Sportsline analysis described the changes as ones that "could lend well to future expansion of gaming in British Columbia into casino apps," and as "setting the stage for similar movement," but the statutory mechanism for any such expansion would require new primary legislation, not regulator-driven rulemaking.
That distinction matters for the wider Canadian poker conversation. The Canadian Lottery Coalition, which this newsroom covered on Wednesday, counts the British Columbia Lottery Corporation as one of its four members. Coalition Executive Director Molly Cormier has been actively making the case in Ottawa and in industry forums that the Ontario open-market model creates regulatory confusion for Canadians in the provinces that have kept the monopoly arrangement. The IGCO's existence does not change BCLC's posture inside the Coalition, and the British Columbia government has not signalled any policy intent to leave the CLC or to liberalise online play.
The Inter-Provincial Picture
Read together with the other two Canadian regulatory developments this newsroom covered earlier in the week, the BC change completes a five-province snapshot of the regulated-iGaming landscape. Ontario is open and now reports a 91.1 per cent channelization rate, according to a fresh Ipsos study released last week and covered in our Wednesday morning report. Alberta opens on July 13 under an Ontario-modelled framework, and its new permanent CEO Dan Keene confirmed at SBC Summit Canada earlier in May that a bilateral memorandum of understanding with Ontario on shared poker liquidity is, in his words, "in the works." Quebec retains its limited Espacejeux poker product on Loto-Québec, with a posture that has hovered between intervenor and observer in the Supreme Court reference on international pooled liquidity. Manitoba runs its product through Manitoba Liquor and Lotteries and remains aligned with the CLC. British Columbia today is structurally further along than any of the other CLC provinces and is the most likely future candidate for an Ontario-style expansion if and when the political conditions change.
The supply side has noticed. Several operators that hold AGCO registrations in Ontario, including the parent companies of GGPoker, BetMGM Poker, PokerStars and 888poker, have been quietly running British Columbia market-readiness studies through the spring. None has committed any capital to the province, because there is no path to do so. But the IGCO's stand-up is the first piece of regulatory architecture that an operator-readiness team in any of those companies can point to as something that resembles what they navigate in Ontario.
The Cullen Commission Backdrop
The political force that put the IGCO in place was not iGaming. It was the Cullen Commission of inquiry into money laundering in British Columbia, which delivered its final report in June 2022 after three years of work, and the earlier German Report on dirty money in BC casinos published in 2018. Both reports documented systemic shortcomings in how the province had been supervised by a regulator that sat inside the same ministry as policing. The pattern of those findings, particularly around the so-called "Vancouver model" of cash-driven laundering through casinos in Burnaby and Richmond in the mid-2010s, produced significant pressure for a structural separation that the new act now implements.
For online poker readers in this province, the relevance is at one remove but is real. The same structural argument, that a regulator independent of the ministry it polices is harder to capture and more effective at AML enforcement, has been one of the underpinnings of the iGaming Ontario Act of 2025 and the formal independence of iGO from the AGCO. The British Columbia version of that argument is now backed by a Supreme Court of Canada inquiry and a multi-year provincial commission. If the file ever moves on online expansion in British Columbia, the institutional foundation is now demonstrably in place.
What Ontario Players Should Take From This
Three things, on a Friday morning at the end of the policy week:
First, the new BC architecture does not change anything operational for Ontario players. PlayNow remains a Crown product; British Columbia remains closed to private online operators; the cross-pool liquidity discussion will continue to focus on the Ontario-Alberta MOU as the realistic near-term file.
Second, the regulatory direction of travel across Canada is increasingly converging on the Ontario template. AGCO and iGO independent of one another, standards-based regulation, revenue-based fees, AML supervision sitting with the regulator rather than the ministry. British Columbia has now built that institutional layer. Alberta opened the door to the private-operator architecture in January. Ontario is the reference point in every conversation.
Third, the political math is moving. The Canadian Lottery Coalition still includes BCLC, but the British Columbia government has now publicly stated that the regulator and the operator should be separate organisations doing separate jobs. That position is harder to reconcile with a long-term defence of a single-operator Crown monopoly on online gaming than it would have been five years ago. The next provincial election in British Columbia is scheduled for October 2028; the file's fate beyond that date is in nobody's currently public plans, but the institutional groundwork is now sitting there for whichever government wants to pick it up.
For now, an Ontario player physically located in this province continues to have access to the broadest regulated online poker offering in Canada. The newest piece of the broader picture is a regulator three thousand kilometres west, looking pointedly familiar.