By Alex Drummond, Editor-in-Chief · May 27, 2026 · Fact-checked by Maya Chen
TORONTO - On the same morning that this newsroom reported a fresh Ipsos study putting Ontario's regulated iGaming channelization rate at 91.1 per cent, a senior figure from the country's monopoly-province lottery establishment offered a counter-narrative that deserves equal weight from anyone who plays online poker in this province. Speaking at last week's SBC Summit Canada in Toronto, Molly Cormier, the new Executive Director of the Canadian Lottery Coalition, said the headline channelization figures still leave large numbers of Canadians genuinely unsure about which platforms are licensed in their province and which are not, and that the advertising environment is the main reason.
"Canadians are confused about what is legal and what is not," Cormier said, in remarks reported by Casino.org. "We owe Canadians legal clarity. That's a real priority of mine."
Cormier was named executive director of the CLC on April 22, 2026, after a decade in public relations, marketing and policy roles at Atlantic Lottery. The Coalition itself is a pan-Canadian alliance of four provincial lottery corporations, Atlantic Lottery, Loto-Québec, Manitoba Liquor and Lotteries, and the British Columbia Lottery Corporation, that formed in late 2021 after the federal government legalised single-event sports betting and triggered a wave of advertising into Canadian sports broadcasting that the monopoly-province operators argue has not since been brought to order. Ontario Lottery and Gaming is conspicuously not a CLC member, for reasons that became obvious in April 2022 when iGaming Ontario opened the market to private operators.
The Parallel-Domains Problem
The single most consequential operational concern Cormier raised on the panel was the practice of operators running near-identical brands across multiple regulatory regimes and using advertising visible in one province to funnel players to a sister domain licensed in another.
"What we're noticing are some operators are advertising with parallel domains in different provinces that will then push people back to their international affiliates," she said. "There's been marketing creative that's specifically targeted to the citizens of that province where operators are not licensed to operate. That's very frustrating."
The implicit reference point is the way several operators that hold an AGCO licence to serve Ontario also run sister operations on the global GGPoker, PokerStars, BetMGM and 888poker brand families, separately licensed in other markets. Ontario players know how those distinctions work. Outside Ontario, the marketing creative does not always make the distinction obvious to a casual viewer. A CBC report cited at the SBC panel found that Manitoba residents are not only seeing Ontario-regulated advertising on national broadcasts but actively using those platforms to place bets, which means cross-border channelization is moving the wrong way for the CLC provinces.
For an Ontario online poker player, the relevance is more subtle. The 91.1 per cent channelization figure published last week measures whether Ontario residents played on regulated Ontario sites. It does not measure the inverse: whether Ontario-regulated advertising is helping to draw players in other provinces, or in some cases American viewers, to platforms not licensed where they live. Both of those side flows are operating, and both are part of what the CLC is now describing as a policy problem.
Bill 107: Defeated on May 13
Cormier's remarks landed two weeks after the most concrete legislative response to the same set of concerns inside Ontario was put to a vote and defeated. Bill 107, the Stop Harmful Gambling Advertising Act, 2026, was tabled at Queen's Park on April 20 by Liberal MPP Lee Fairclough, the party's critic for mental health, addictions and homelessness. The bill would have amended the Gaming Control Act, 1992 to prohibit any AGCO-registered online gaming operator, and any person acting on its behalf, from advertising on broadcast media, social media or paid sponsorships. Penalties ran to C$1 million per corporate conviction, with mandatory licence revocation on a second offence.
Fairclough moved second reading on May 13. Hansard records her remarks across about forty minutes of private members' public business. "The bill would ban online gambling advertising in Ontario, bringing an end to the flood of online gambling advertisements that are supercharging gambling addiction in this province," she told the Legislature. "Provincial governments have the primary responsibility to protect the health of their people. Speaker, we have the full ability as a province to act on this right now. Every member in this Legislature can vote for this change today."
The vote followed on May 14. The Progressive Conservatives, who hold an 80-seat majority in the Legislature against the Liberals' 14 seats, defeated the bill, in line with public expectations from the moment of its introduction. ConnexOntario, the province's gambling-help phone line, had reported a 254 per cent increase in gambling-related calls since the April 2022 market launch, a figure Fairclough cited as part of her public health argument. The bill itself will not return in its current form during this parliamentary session.
The CLC Position, Carefully Calibrated
It is important to be precise about the CLC's stance. Cormier explicitly told the SBC panel that the Coalition does not support a total advertising ban of the kind Bill 107 proposed. The CLC supports the federal Bill S-211, the National Framework on Sports Betting Advertising Act, which has passed the Senate and is currently before the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage. Bill S-211 would create a national framework for restricting sports-betting advertising but would not ban it outright. The distinction matters: the monopoly-province lottery corporations themselves run lottery advertising and have no interest in establishing a federal precedent that would extinguish their own promotional capacity.
"I'd love to do a national advertising campaign," Cormier said when asked about constructive next steps. "I am open to any conversation."
Patrick Harris, the President of Rubicon Strategy and a fellow panellist, was less measured. "On advertising, I'll just say there is way too much. It is dramatic," he said. "I think the industry is losing its social license with the public at an alarming rate, and I think if the industry doesn't do something about it themselves, government's going to do it. I highly recommend the industry needs to come up with some tangible solutions to deal with the advertising issue."
Harris extended the argument to the open-market expansion file. "What is going to be the key question for the industry moving forward is how they're acting in Ontario and Alberta," he said. "How they're using that social license is going to dictate whether it's going to be able to be run through the rest of Canada." That framing is significant given the Alberta-Ontario MOU on shared liquidity covered in yesterday's report from this newsroom: the working assumption inside the industry is that Alberta's July 13 launch will be watched closely by the CLC provinces, and that the advertising posture of regulated operators in the two open markets will materially affect whether any other province moves to copy the model in the next decade.
The Angus Reid Number
The Coalition also cited a new piece of public-opinion research at the panel: an Angus Reid iGaming industry study released last week that found one in five parents of children aged 10 to 17 said the child had already asked them about sports betting. Of those parents, 50 per cent said the question came from a son, 24 per cent from a daughter, and 17 per cent from both. The data point is non-trivial for the broader regulatory conversation, even if it is not specifically a poker number, and it is the kind of finding that drives the political calculus around Bill S-211 forward in the House of Commons.
Cormier framed her own concern in similar terms. "I'm not a gambler, I don't necessarily understand the industry, but they're consistently bringing up personal stories about young people in their lives, especially males, and how they're engaging with gambling products," she said, paraphrasing the kind of remark she said she encounters in conversations with stakeholders on the periphery of the industry. "As an industry, we don't want to put our heads in the sand and say, everything's fine, nothing to see here. The coalition has decided that a key part of our mandate is consumer protection."
What This Means for Ontario Poker
Online poker is, in practice, a small share of Ontario's regulated iGaming activity, and it is not the format that drove either Bill 107 or the CLC's social-license argument. Both files are about sports betting and slots. But the legislative and political environment for online poker depends on the broader regulated market keeping its social license intact, and the news this week is that the broader regulated market is no longer comfortably ahead on that question.
For an Ontario player, three practical consequences follow:
First, the AGCO's "no bonusing" rule for iGaming advertising in Ontario, which prohibits Ontario-licensed operators from promoting sign-up bonuses on local advertising, will keep doing the work it was designed to do, and the regulator will continue to enforce it. There is no political appetite at the provincial level to either tighten the rule into a full ban or to relax it to a US-style bonus-driven marketing environment. The defeat of Bill 107 settled that for at least this session.
Second, the federal Bill S-211, if it clears the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage and the House of Commons under Prime Minister Carney's majority, will create a federal framework on sports-betting advertising that will reach into Ontario by virtue of broadcast jurisdiction. Online poker operators that also advertise sports betting, which is to say most of the six regulated rooms, will need to recalibrate their advertising plans for the second half of 2026.
Third, the public conversation about the industry is now being shaped by stakeholders that explicitly disagree with the open-market model. The Coalition is not a fringe player; it speaks for four provincial lottery corporations that together cover roughly half of Canada's population. Cormier's argument that the existing model "owes Canadians legal clarity" is going to be cited regularly in the coming year by other regulators, federal departments and consumer groups. The Ontario industry's response will, more than the channelization data alone, determine whether the model survives intact for another four years.
"It just shows the level of complexity with the topic," Cormier said in closing on the panel. "We just want legal clarity, a level playing field, no matter what model the provinces are choosing. The coalition doesn't exist to block whatever model the province chooses."
That is the carefully calibrated public position. The pressure underneath it, on Ontario, on Alberta and on the federal Heritage Minister, is the real story.