The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - Does Ontario Profit Too Much From Gambling and Alcohol?

Episode Date: April 10, 2026

Online betting now brings in major revenue for the province, but experts warn that the financial upside may come with mounting public-health costs. A similar tension shows up in new data on alcohol use: fewer Ontarians are drinking, yet binge drinking rates remain stubbornly high. What explains the disconnect, and what responsibility does government have when it profits from addictive products? We speak with addiction researchers Andrew Kim and Dominique Morisano.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

When TVO first went on air in 1970, the idea that public television could have a positive impact on learning was visionary. From beloved kid shows that sparked the joy of learning, pioneering must-see favorites exploring society and culture and series that made navigating life on Ontario a little easier, TVO's commitment to lifelong learning has stood the test of time. Renew your support now and help preserve this legacy. Visit TVO.comme slash 2026 renewal to make your donation today. Hi, I'm Nam Kiwanuka, host and producer of Mastreated, a podcast on women's health. There just hasn't been a lot of money put into researching women's health issues. If women are in pain, it's hysteria, it's an emotional issue.

And this is what we see consistently. Women's health is not taken seriously. How did we get here? Find us wherever you get your podcasts, and be sure to check out the video version of the show on the TVO Today YouTube channel. Hope to see you then. the Leafs are going to lose tonight, you can bet on it, literally. You can also bet on pretty much every aspect of the game. And chances are you already know that, because sports betting ads are everywhere. They have been ever since 2022 when the province legalize online gambling and sports betting. They started regulating it all through what's known as Eye Gaming Ontario. And since then, the province has been cashing in. According to this year's budget, the agency is projecting

$294 million in revenue for 2026, 27. But this comes with a cost. One recent study found that young men are now making more calls to gambling-related help lines, and the responsible gambling council recently released a government-backed PSA aimed at them. Here's part of it. But is there more the province could be doing to keep people safe? We'll look at the impact of online gambling and the government's role. Then, Ontarians are drinking less overall, so why are rates of binge drinking still high? Welcome to the rundown. Online betting makes this province a lot of money every year, but experts say this big payday

for the government could also be a threat to public health. Andrew Kim is an associate professor in the Department of Psychology at Toronto Metropolitan University, and Canada Research Chair in Addictions and Mental Health, Comorbidity. And we welcome you into our studio. How are you doing? Good. Thank you for having me. Well, let's talk Ontario legalized online gambling in 2022 to bring existing unregulated, quote-unquote, gray market into a safe, more regulated market.

However, since then, calls from young men contacting the province's mental health helpline for gambling-related problems shot up by nearly 300%. Can you explain the disconnect to there when the province is saying a safe market, and we've got this rise. Yeah, so it's a bit of a paradox, right? They're saying we want to make gambling a little bit safer, but we're seeing increases in harms.

And just to clarify, online gambling has been legal in Ontario. What really changed is prior to 2022 and I gaming, OLG was the only legal provider of gambling here. But that changed. For OLG, for people who are. weren't familiar? Ontario Lottery Gaming Corporation. So you're a lot of max folks, right?

What changed, though, was that now Ontario allowed private operators to pay a license fee and be legally allowed to offer gambling products to Ontario residents. That kind of opened the floodgates. So before you only had, like the LCBO, just

one place you can go to gamble, but now I think there's about 50 gambling operators and about 80 different sites. So options. A lot of options. A lot of options.

It's available on your mobile phones. And so now gambling, online gambling has become more accessible and widely available. So you increase access and availability to a potentially harmful product. I say potentially, an addictive product. And likely the result is going to be an increase in people experiencing gambling addiction. And I think that's where we're seeing the increase in calls to the gambling helpline, essentially. Now, we tend to see in that data as well young men. Does gambling specifically target young men?

No, things have changed, actually. I've been hearing from colleagues that the people they're seeing in their office, who they're seeing in the office has changed considerably. And I think part of that is not just the online gambling, but the other interesting thing that happened was changes to sports betting. So prior to, it's both three, four years ago, single event betting where you can just bet on the one outcome of a match was illegal. So you can only bet on parlay. So it has to be three plus outcomes like your typical proline.

Right, okay. But with the change in federal law along single event betting, what I think happened is that the single event, they didn't specify if it had to be at the macro level. simply put, didn't specify that it had to be the winner of a game. Okay. So what's an event in sport? Almost anything, really. And so that, I think, opened the doors for in-play bets and micro-bets, meaning that within, say, we're watching game of hockey, right?

Okay. Saying the Leafs, we're watching it. Theoretically, you can make hundreds of bets while that game is happening because you don't have to bet on who's going to win. Right. It's on who scored, assists, all that. So it changed sort of the structural nature. of gambling and that makes it a bit more risky.

So sports betting is generally, if we look at who bets on sports in Canada, they're young men. And so with the legalization of single vent betting, with opening up the gambling market, you get a flood of advertisements. And I think those who are specifically, a lot of them, the sports betting ads, are targeted towards that demographic. And so I think that's what's accounting for the increase in that demographic. We know gambling is not just about losing money or winning money in some cases. What are some of the other ways that it can cause problems? Yeah. So I just want to say that gambling is an addiction, like alcohol, like cannabis.

In the DSM, which is sort of the – people call it the Bible of psychiatry, but it's the textbook that we use that tells us, you know, what are mental disorders, what are the criteria. And so gambling is classified as. an addiction, and that's because there's decades of evidence suggesting that gambling like alcohol and cannabis can cause significant problems. So money is one, right? It's probably the most common harm that we see. But it could also be related to interpersonal difficulties, difficulties with your partner, with family. It can interfere with your schoolwork. It can cause problems at work. If you're spending so much time planning out your bets, you're preoccupied,

You're researching who's playing tonight, have they been doing? Imagine losing $2,000 you needed to pay rent. How much stress is that going to cause? And I think part of that is then it leads to depression, could lead to anxiety. And I would also say that for some people, gambling is a way to cope with mental health difficulties. Like alcohol, like cannabis, gambling can sort of help with our distress, sort of that self-medication hypotheses. So the harms of gambling, I think, is just wider than finances. With that being said, does Ontario view gambling as a public health issue the same way substance abuse?

I would say no, not yet. If they did, I think there would be a bit more controls into how they rolled out everything. And so we don't have as much tighter policies related to gambling as we do with alcohol and, say, cannabis. An example of that is advertisement. There is no federal law right now regarding advertisements for gambling, but we have one for alcohol. We have one for cannabis. Yet gambling we don't. So I don't think people view this as much of a public health concern as they would with substances. Now, one of that being, one of the cases is this is quite a lucrative business.

Are you concerned that this will translate into a lack of political will to sort of put in safeguards? I guess that depends for you. ask, right? If you're someone in the government that really wants to increase revenues, you're probably thinking, oh, this is good. Look how much money we're bringing into the province. Well, this is a government that is facing a $14 billion shortfall in the budget. But if there are others who are seeing this and be like, no, we need to do something. So I do think it depends on who you ask. There are senators that are working, like Senator Deacon, who's trying to pass some regulations related to advertisement. But I would also caution that

$258 million is a lot. But what's the harm? What's the social and economic impact that is going to have to Ontario? So people that are experiencing gambling addiction can have significant impact to our economy, to our healthcare system, which I don't think they're factoring into their calculations. You're seeing $258 million generated, but what's the health care cost of that? What's the economic cost of that? What's the personal cost of people experiencing harms? And so, I think it depends on who you ask. And that $258 million is only 20% of revenues generated. 80% goes back to private operators.

That's a huge amount of money that's leaving the province. So I'm not sure it's the best deal for Ontario. All right. Let's change gears a little bit. Let's talk about some potential fixes here from your view. We talked about the uptick in young men contacting Ontario's mental health helpline, one of them being Connects, Ontario, C-O-N and E-X. Are these helplines beneficial? What is the experience for someone who is using one of these helplines?

They can be. They absolutely can be. I've done some research this a while ago related to the effectiveness of helplines, and it really depends on the reason people use it for. For example, if it's for information, Connects, Ontario will do a really great job of providing information related to gambling addiction and where they may be go to help. Some helplines across the world provide brief treatments. That seems to work. But yeah, it can be helpful. I think I would encourage people that are experiencing problems needing help to reach out

because they're in a position that can connect you to the right people. The gap is when you get that information, what's the next step? Do you actually then go to whatever the recommendations are? So there's a little bit of drop there, but I think it can be. helpful first step. Is there any treatment for online gambling that would be covered by the Ontario's medical system? Yeah, so actually how I got into the field, I first started as a problem gambling counselor at William Moser Health System in Brampton, and that was fully covered by O'Hibb. So if you contact Connects Ontario or access mental health, and you say, you know, I'm struggling with a gambling,

they can find you publicly available funded treatment services within your area. So there are services available. There's a lot of research suggesting that treatment for problem gambling can be effective. And so I think it's a really good resource, something that we have. I'm imagining in order to create sort of a safe gambling sort of ecosystem, ads and PSAs are a part of that. And the Ontario government also currently just rolled out one. How effective are some of these PSAs in terms of addressing the problem? Let's see.

I want to see the PSA. What I'll say is that for the responsible gambling advertisements that companies do, those are not effective. Why not? Because they serve as a brand awareness. So you have BetMGM having who's with BetMGM. Let's go sports interaction, maybe Mitch Marner saying bet responsibly. You're really just advertising your brand to people that like,

Mitch Marner, Connor McDavid, Austin Matthews. It doesn't actually tell you what does bet responsibly mean? How does one do that? And I actually went to the site to see, okay, they're advertising Connor McDavid saying bet responsibly, gamble responsibly. I go on their site, I can't find McDavid. He's really hard to find. So it serves as more of a brand awareness rather than an ability to help people kind of moderate

their gambling. It's actually kind of funny. We did a recent research study, and responsible gambling ads were frequently seen, but they're not that effective. They said that didn't help me reduce my gambling. It might have increased it actually, whereas for other types of advertisements, people who bet on sports, perceive that, yeah, it impact their sports betting, whereas responsive gambling didn't impact reducing their sports betting. With that being said, if health minister Sylvia Jones was sitting across from us today, what are some policy changes that you would ask her to make, you know, online gambling sort of a safer space?

Yeah, so one is curved the advertisements. I think it's incessant. I don't think a lot of Ontarians like how much we're being bombarded. The reason why I got into the space was because I'm a huge sports fan, and I notice all these advertisements. So have some restrictions around that. So that's not to be a complete bet. I'm not sure if that would be something that's on the table,

but there are things that you can do to reduce the amount and the content to universal self-exclusion. So I think this was something that Ontario did consider. So for those that are wondering, what does that mean, is if you're experiencing a problem with gambling, right, one of the symptoms of a gambling addiction is loss of control. You're having difficulties trying to control how much you gamble, how often you gamble.

So you could go to OLG and say, look, I'm really having a difficult time right now. Could you help me make sure that I don't come to your casinos, ban me from your apps, to give me a bit of that time that I need to try to figure this out? But now with 50 different operators, I can ban myself or self-exclude on OLG, but in that moment where I'm really craving there's all these urges, what's stopping me from signing up for another site? I ban myself from there, but then, again, there's so many different options.

So universal self-exclusion. So in that time when I'm saying, you know, I really need help. You can ban yourself in one and it just kind of carries through. And then mandatory limit setting. Having people set how much when and where you can bet, I think that would be helpful. Well, right now, people can do it, but it's an opt-in. Okay. But again, most people don't use that.

Andrew, this was really fascinating stuff, really important work as well. Really appreciate your time and insights on this. Thank you so much. My pleasure. Thanks for having me. A study from the Center for Addiction and Mental Health finds that fewer Ontarians are drinking than before the pandemic. But rates of binge drinking, defined as having five or more drinks on a single occasion, haven't gone down. So what's driving the disconnect? Dr. Dominique Morisano is a clinical psychologist and an adjunct professor at the University of Toronto.

Dr. Marasano, great to have you on the show. According to the KMH report, fewer adults in Ontario drank. in the past year compared to before the pandemic. However, binge drinking still remains high. Help us understand that. What's the disconnect there? Well, I think that, you know, there are a number of reasons for this. It's, you know, multifactorial.

And, you know, I think while fewer people may be drinking overall, and, you know, we've noticed a lot of trends with, you know, dry January and things like that, it feels like more people are sober curious, but the people that are drinking, when they are drinking, they're drinking to get drunk. And I think that, you know, increased economic difficulties, which we've seen, you know, across the province, increases in stress, depression and anxiety have all been contributing factors to higher binge drinking rates. Is there a distinction between a binge drinker and an alcohol? Yeah, there's a major difference between a binge drinker and an alcoholic.

And in fact, like, in general, I try not to use terms that define people by a problem that they have. So, you know, people who binge drink, you know, because we're so much more than that in general, right? Whatever we may be doing in our daily life. But, you know, when people have alcohol use disorder, which some people call alcoholism, it's a chronic condition that, you know, requires that really move. people to have to drink on the regular, right? Daily, maybe multiple times during the day. And binge drinking is more of a behavior pattern where you're, for women, it's drinking four or more drinks at any given time. And for men, it's drinking five or more drinks at any given time. I think viewers and listeners might be surprised that when we hear sort of the definition

of five drinks or four drinks, that that would be, you know, classified as someone who would be binge drinker. Is that, is that, is that, is that, is that, is that, is that, is that, is that, is that, is that, is because loses control over the amount that they're drinking. They're not maybe making good decisions. Maybe their inhibitions are fully, you know, uh, you know, uh, dismantled. But the other thing is that people don't necessarily know what a standard drink is. And people are often surprised that, you know, a full pint in Ontario, which is about, you know, 20 ounces is not a drink.

That's more like a drink and a half, that a 12 ounce beer is a standard drink or like a one and a half ounce of heart alcohol or, you know, five ounces of wine. You know, sometimes they even have big glasses of wine. So really getting people to think about what am I actually just. drinking. It's four standard drinks for women, five standard drinks for men. You talked a little bit about sort of the factors. Help us understand more what actually makes someone likely to binge drink. Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, for many people, well, it depends on people's ages, right? I think young people often will binge drink, frankly because of inexperience, not understanding how alcohol works, you know, what their own

limits are, how much is it going to take for them to get drunk, stay drunk, go beyond drunk to quite ill, you know, and I think peer pressure has a big role to play in that. You know, when people are like, come on, we're all drinking, you know, another one, another one. And like, let's do another shot, whatever. It's a lot of people don't have the self-confidence or, you know, let's just say psychological strength to say, you know, actually I'm good. I'm good where I am. You know, they want to kind of go along for the ride. And they aren't often thinking about the potential consequences that they may find themselves with later.

personality traits like an increased likelihood of impulsivity, sensation seeking, low conscientiousness, which is a personality trait that's measured by something called the Big Five personality inventory, sometimes high stress, obviously anxiety, depression, genetic factors can play a role like careability, like if your parents, grandparents had issues with alcohol or risky drinking, it is more likely that, you know, the next generation will. Yeah, I would say those are the biggest factors at play. There might be people who, even colleagues of ours, when we first started talking about this story, talked about, you know, what is that definition of been drinking, being surprised

and probably with your definition, you know, of what a pint is, might even surprise them a little bit more. But can you help lay out the risks associated with binge drinking where, you know, some people might say or have this understanding that there is some control, that I do have control of this. But at what point does that teeter or what are the risks overall with binge drinking? Yeah. I mean, so the immediate risks of drinking too much, often, you know,

one of the most obvious ones is making poor decisions, right? So oftentimes people will do things or be uninhibited and make decisions, you know, about behaviors, you know, acts acting out, maybe participating in unsafe sexual behaviors, unsafe activities with other people, violence. they may have unintentional injuries like falls, tripping, crashing, cars. You know, we know that that's a big one. We know that violent behavior can increase with drinking. And of course, there's alcohol poisoning, which is not uncommon and which can be fatal, which I think a lot of people don't know. So those are the, you know, the behaviors of binge drinking.

or the risks of binge drinking itself. And then I think chronic risks of continuing to binge drink over time are related to, you know, many of the risks associated with alcohol use disorder, you know, like liver disease, cancer, high blood pressure, heart disease, and of course, alcohol dependence. I want to talk about access. As we know in Ontario, alcohol is now available at grocery stores. They're at your convenience store. How much does that add to the problem? problem. Well, yeah, actually, I've been working in the area of alcohol and public health, believe it or not, since I was a teenager, so for decades. And one of my mentors was a huge expert in alcohol policy. And I was talking with him about this yesterday. And, you know,

he was saying, he was saying, there's no, there's no doubt that. increasing access is linked to increased problems. And we know that the more availability people have to alcohol, the worse the problems are. This is, I think there's been hundreds of studies across many countries showing the link between ease of access and increased public health problems. And physical availability restrictions have been a basic part of comprehensive alcohol policy for a long time. We know that they can reduce rates of hazardous and harmful drinking when there are fewer places to buy alcohol, when the hours are reduced, when there are age limitations on drinking. And studies have shown that these restrictions have.

have reduced motor vehicle related deaths, violent acts, even homicide rates. On the flip side of this, we do know that alcohol is big money. The LCBO, the Liquor Control Board of Ontario, is bringing in about $1.7 billion if we look at the 25-26 year. I'm curious, does that raise concerns that the province might be less motivated to deal with the harms related to alcohol with the revenue being so lucrative? I think if the politicians aren't looking at the costs involved, then yes, it would be impactful. If they're just looking at the headlines or the big numbers and not all of the other numbers that are related to alcohol harms, then they, you know, they might get confused and think that this is a big win.

But regarding revenues, you know, from taxes or, you know, from the LCBO, they don't come close to paying for the costs attributed to alcohol from hospitalizations, premature deaths, criminal justice enforcement, social services for drinkers and problems in work settings. I was looking up some statistics yesterday and, you know, I saw something that said, alcohol, beyond loss of life, alcohol is the most costly substance in Canada in terms of health care, law enforcement, and loss productivity measured about, it measured the cost being about 20 billion in 2020 for Canada. So 1.7 billion, you know, 20 billion across the country, they're not equivalent figures. And I think that, you know, the revenues that might be lost to provinces with increased restrictions on availability, such as taking it out of grocery stores, corner stores, things like that, can easily be recouped by savings and health care costs,

social services, and the fact that consumers are going to be spending more money in other parts of the economy. I have patients that have maxed out credit cards from alcohol purchases, but when they're not spending money on alcohol, they're actually spending money on education, on, you know, skills to help their own health, you know, and that has, that's obviously going to have a lot of benefits when we are multiplied. With that being said, Dr. Morassano, you work in the clinical space. So I do want to ask, you know, what's one piece of advice for someone who is experiencing

binge drinking and is concerned? What advice do you have for them? Yeah, I mean, so first things first, the fact that someone is acknowledging that they have a problem is the most important point. So that's a good thing if someone says, I think I'm actually drinking too much, right? So someone can always talk to their primary care doctor about resources and brief interventions and things like that. In Ontario, there are a lot of alcohol-related services that are covered by OIP, connects Ontario. C-O-N-N-E-X, Ontario is a great resource for finding those places. And for my, you know, patients that are concerned about actually going out, you know,

I always say, like, try to think about your limit. Try to think about your personal limit for what's your tipping point, you know, and stick to that limit. And I often suggest that people interspersed drinks with water. So if you have a drink, then have a glass of water and see how much you want the next drink. Having some accountability across friends, like, let's only drink this much tonight, or I'm only going to drink this much. Please help me stick to that. And then, yes, he can help when needed. Dr. Marsano, we are going to have to leave it there. But thank you so much for your

insights. Really thank you for it. Yeah, appreciate being on. I'm Jayne. Thanks for spending some time with us on The Rundown. We want this show to reflect you and what you care about. So what should we cover next? Let us know at the Rundown. at TVO.org or drop us a comment on YouTube. Until then, I will see you next week.