By Alex Drummond, Editor-in-Chief · May 28, 2026 · Fact-checked by Maya Chen
TORONTO - Two related strands of Ontario's iGaming policy file came back into public view this week, and read together they describe what the next chapter of regulated online poker advertising in this province is going to look like. On Thursday, the Standing Committee on Public Accounts' motion to adopt recommendations from its November 2024 report on the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation, including five recommendations directly affecting the iGaming sector, returned to the Legislative Assembly's Order Paper. The week before, at SBC Summit Canada in Toronto, Tourism, Culture and Gaming Minister Stan Cho confirmed in his ministerial address that the province is "very seriously" considering additional advertising rules for the online sports betting and iGaming market.
For the Ontario online poker player, the relevance is direct. The provincial regulator that supervises GGPoker Ontario, BetMGM Poker, PokerStars Ontario, 888poker, PartyPoker and Bwin operates under standards that have been quietly evolving since 2024, and the political signal from this week is that the next round of evolution is now an active file in the minister's office.
Cho's Calibrated Signal
Minister Cho's remarks at SBC Summit Canada last Thursday, reported in Covers.com's coverage by Geoff Zochodne, were the first public confirmation from the responsible minister that additional advertising measures are on the table. Cho was specific. "We recognize that, and we will continue to look at advertising and what we can do to make sure that it is reasonable when it comes to online gaming," he told the conference. "Now, I don't have all the answers on what we will be looking at yet, but I had a conversation with the attorney general, and we are very seriously looking at additional measures on the advertising side to make sure this doesn't make the problem grow."
The minister did not commit to an outright ban of the kind Bill 107 would have imposed before it was defeated on May 13 by a 33-60 margin at second reading. Cho's framing left clear daylight between the position of his government and the private member's bill that the same caucus voted to block. "Balance," he said, "is the key to it all." Ontario, he added, would work with federal partners on Bill S-211 "to do what's reasonable, and hopefully we can find some shared common ground on what responsible gaming looks like," while "respecting the rights that exist within the province" and recognising that "businesses have a right to operate in this province as well, without undue regulations and laws that get in their way."
The personal note in his remarks landed harder than the policy framing. "It's familiar to my family, so I understand the pain that families can go through when this becomes a serious issue," Cho said, before adding, with reference to the constituent stories Progressive Conservative MPPs are bringing him about young men in their ridings: "Advertising is a huge part of it. This is a growing problem." The minister gave no timeline for new advertising measures, and on the open question of where the file goes next he said only that he is "waiting to see where things go next."
The Standing Committee File
The second strand of the week is older but has now formally re-entered the legislative process. Government Orders item 4 on Thursday's Order Paper at Queen's Park resumed debate, adjourned on October 20, 2025, on the motion to adopt the recommendations contained in the Standing Committee on Public Accounts report on the Value-For-Money Audit of the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation: Casinos, Lotteries and Internet Gaming. The underlying audit was tabled by the Auditor General of Ontario as part of the 2022 annual report. The committee, chaired by NDP MPP Tom Rakocevic, re-adopted its report on May 26, 2025 to be bilingual and reported to the House, and it now sits on the Order Paper as an item the government must address before the legislative session closes.
The report contains nine recommendations. Five of those touch the iGaming sector directly or by jurisdiction:
- Recommendation 3: "The Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario enforce its standards on advertising for internet gaming." The AGCO has already moved on this. Updated advertising standards prohibiting the use of athletes and most celebrities in iGaming marketing came into effect on February 28, 2024, and were accompanied by a guidance document in the same month.
- Recommendation 4: "The Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario consider requiring pop-up warning messages on internet gaming websites on the risks associated with gaming and addiction." This recommendation is unimplemented. It has been carried in the committee's recommendations file since 2022 and remains live as the AGCO continues to consult.
- Recommendation 6: "The Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation implement a requirement for casinos to obtain source of funds documentation for all cash buy-ins above $10,000 as planned." Implementation was committed by OLG by October 2023. Casino-focused, but anti-money laundering is the same regulatory file that runs through iGaming.
- Recommendation 8: "The Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation report back to the Committee on the status of its efforts to procure and implement a centralized province-wide suspicious transaction reporting system." Target date, per OLG: 2025. The corresponding centralised system on the iGaming side is part of the AGCO's broader compliance architecture.
- Recommendation 9: "The Ministry of Tourism, Culture and Gaming and the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation consider anti-money laundering experience an asset in future appointments to its Board of Directors."
None of the nine recommendations explicitly mentions poker, and the audit pre-dated the launch of the regulated peer-to-peer poker market in April 2022 by a matter of months. But the broader iGaming framework that produced the channelization data reported in this newsroom on Wednesday sits inside the regulatory perimeter the committee is asking the government to formally adopt.
The 2024 Advertising Floor
The advertising file is the most operationally relevant to Ontario poker readers. The AGCO's 2024 changes, which were the regulator's direct response to Recommendation 3 of the committee's report, are now the floor that any new measure would build on. Under the standards effective February 28, 2024, registered iGaming operators in Ontario are prohibited from using active or retired athletes in marketing, except in the narrow case of exclusive responsible-gambling advocacy. Celebrities and social media influencers "who would be expected to appeal to minors" are similarly restricted. The standards also enforce the "no bonusing in local advertising" rule that distinguishes the Ontario iGaming marketing environment from the bonus-driven approaches in the United States and parts of Europe.
What the minister is now signalling is that those rules are not the final state. The AGCO is, in the language of the committee report, "currently looking at those advertising standards with the goal of minimizing potential harms to youth and children." Pop-up warning messages are the most concrete item on the list of changes that has been publicly aired and remains unimplemented. The AGCO has consulted operators on the design of such warnings; what is missing is the regulatory mandate that would require their universal deployment across all iGaming sites licensed in the province.
Where Poker Sits
Operationally, the six registered poker rooms in Ontario already comply with most of the policy environment that any new advertising measure would imply. The "no bonusing" rule is enforced in all six rooms' Ontario-facing creative. None of the rooms advertise with active athletes or with celebrities likely to appeal to minors. The recently launched BetGuard self-exclusion system is integrated. Marketing creative for poker products tends, in any case, to skew toward poker-aware audiences rather than the broader sports-betting demographic that has driven the most contentious advertising debates.
The category to watch is the cross-marketed integrated operator. GGPoker Ontario and BetMGM Poker share advertising real estate with their sportsbook and casino counterparts at the operator level, and any new restriction on the broader category will inevitably wash through the poker product's marketing capacity in this province. PokerStars, in the middle of its migration to the FanDuel-Flutter Ontario footprint after the May 7 ring-fenced shutdown, will run into the same dynamic when the platform reopens.
Cho's remarks acknowledged the integration directly, citing the "more than 40 private-sector operators currently offering more than 70 sports betting, iGaming, and poker sites" in the province, and the 1.2 million active players who, per the AGCO's latest Ipsos research, are now spending the bulk of their time on regulated platforms. He also explicitly raised the offshore alternative. "They're realizing that there is a grey market out there that people can still game on," he said, of Ontario players. The government's posture, he said, is to bring play "in-house" rather than to chase players offshore. The implication is that the next round of advertising measures will be calibrated against the channelization data, not against the rhetorical case for an outright ban.
What the Recommendations File Means for the Schedule
The Standing Committee process operates on its own clock. The Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation, the Ministry of Tourism, Culture and Gaming, and the AGCO were each asked to provide written responses to the committee's nine recommendations within 120 calendar days of tabling. Some of those responses have been delivered. The committee's debate on the Order Paper today is procedural in nature; the motion's adoption commits the government to formally taking the recommendations into account, but does not impose new statutory obligations.
In practice, the most likely route for the unimplemented advertising-related items is through AGCO's standard-setting power rather than through the Legislature. Recommendation 4, the pop-up warning messages provision, would be implemented through a Registrar's Standard amendment. Recommendation 8, the centralised suspicious-transaction reporting system, would be implemented through AGCO compliance infrastructure rolled out in coordination with FINTRAC, the federal anti-money-laundering body. Neither path requires a House vote.
What the Cho remarks suggest is that the minister's office is now actively reviewing whether to layer additional standards on top of the AGCO's 2024 floor. Industry counsel briefed on the file expect the first concrete signal of direction to land in the coming weeks, possibly attached to the next round of the Registrar's Standards consultation. The intersection with Bill S-211 at the federal level, currently before the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage, adds an extra constraint.
The Bigger Picture
The May 2026 channelization data and the May 2026 ad-rules debate are two sides of the same regulatory question. The 91.1 per cent figure has given the AGCO and iGaming Ontario the strongest single piece of evidence the regulated market is performing as designed. That evidence will be used in conversation with both Alberta and the Canadian Lottery Coalition. It also reduces the political cost of additional restrictions: if 91 cents of every dollar wagered online in Ontario is now flowing through regulated channels, tightening the rules at the margin no longer risks pushing players offshore in numbers that would alarm Treasury Board.
For the Ontario online poker player, the read is straightforward. The product itself is not the target of the advertising conversation. The category is. Anything Minister Cho or the AGCO does in the coming months is likely to affect how operators speak to the public, not how they run their poker games. But what is increasingly clear is that the framework around those games is being actively reshaped, in public, on the floor of Queen's Park and on the panel circuit at SBC Summit Canada, and that the political and regulatory direction of travel is toward more, not fewer, advertising rules.
The committee's motion will be voted on in due course. The minister's next concrete announcement on advertising is the date to circle.