The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - Is Online Gambling Becoming Too Hard to Ignore?

Episode Date: October 2, 2026

Gambling addiction can be easy to hide, even for someone in the public eye. Television and radio personality Rick Campanelli opens up about his own struggle with gambling and the impact it had behind the scenes of his successful career. Then, as online betting becomes easier to access and gambling ads increasingly surround sports, we ask whether Canada is doing enough to prevent addiction. Robin Campbell, co-founder of Ban Ads on Gambling, and CAMH scientist Nigel E. Turner discuss the risks of online gambling, how to recognize when someone may be struggling, and whether new restrictions on sports betting advertising could make a difference.Donate Today : https://tvo.me/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What a difference a year can make. When you support TVO, you're helping bring trusted stories, inspiring ideas, and lifelong learning to people across Ontario. And as a thank you, you can receive the 2027 TVO calendar. Filled with beautiful photography from the documentaries and programs your support helps make possible. It's a year-long reminder of the learning, beauty, and discovery your generosity supports. Donate $40 or more to claim yours today at TVO.com. slash calendar 2027 and make every month a little more inspiring. If you haven't seen the ads in person, you might have read some of the articles about them

because they've caused a whole lot of controversy. Actress Sidney's Sweeney bearing it all for a sports betting site. And just try to watch a game without seeing actor John Hamm, also starring in ads. Sports betting has become hot. hard to miss woven into the experience of watching sports itself. But look beyond the ads and you'll find some very different headlines about ER visits on the rise, about a spike in helpline calls, and about other harms, especially affecting young men. So what happens when something designed to keep you betting is also being sold as just another part of the game? And are the rules around gambling

advertising doing enough to protect the people most at risk? But first, we talk to entertainment journalist Rick Campanelli about the personal toll gambling can take. I'm Jay and Jagganovin and this is the Rundown. The Globe and Mail called Rick Campanelli a walking, talking success story. After winning a much music contest in 1994, he ended up becoming an on-air personality and making

a career in entertainment. But no one knew how much he was struggling. Rick Campanelli, great to have you in our Rundtend studios. How you doing? I'm doing great. Awesome. Yeah. I want to start with an excerpt from your book. Sure.

It reads, moments later with a knapsack on my back, and the two Homeland Security officers tightly flanked on either side of me, the three of us marched through the virtually empty airport terminal. What's going on? We're just escorting you, Mr. Campanelli. The police officer will tell you everything you need to know. The police station inside McCarran International Airport was a simple office, manned by one weary police officer behind a desk.

He was waiting for me, and the Homeland Security officer slipped. out of the room as soon as I flopped onto a chair. The Clark County officer got down to business. You know you owe these big boys a lot of money, Mr. Campanelli. He didn't need to explain anything more. We both knew exactly what he meant. I'm getting warm by you just reading that.

Reads like a movie. I was holding on to the book and I was like, oh. So your book, Tempted, reveals a gambling addiction most people didn't know about. What happened that U.S. Homeland Security has to escort you off a plane as you're landing in Las Vegas on a work trip. Yeah. You brought me right back to that moment.

So months prior to that, I went down to Vegas to bring some money back home with me. And there are markers that you loan from casinos. You have to prove that you have enough money in your bank account for them to say, yeah, okay, we'll give you a marker. You look like you're in good sense. standing financially, and I was at the time. It was all a plan to put money down on a new condo that I needed to move in.

Now, I'm really fast-forwarding along here. But long story short, John, I didn't pay these casinos back in time. I was paying them off a little bit by little bit as the days and weeks went by, but he was right. These big boys, when they want their money, they want their money. They don't fool around. Some may be thinking to themselves, why didn't you pay them all back right away?

There was a number of things that were going on at the time. Like, when you're addicted to something, like as I was with gambling, you got the blinders on. You're going through life out of control. You want to gamble. You want to try to make more money, and you're losing a lot of money.

The house always wins. I didn't pay them back in time. I've been paying them back a little bit here, they're a little bit there. So I was going down to Las Vegas for a company trip, work trip, an assignment for a DVD release party for the hangover. The hangover. See, I can laugh now.

Because this happened years ago. Fair enough. That's why I laugh now about it. But, yeah, and my then, well, my wife, Angie, she was then, my girlfriend. She was right by my side. and she had no clue what was going on. In total, you spent, what, 36 hours? Yeah.

In the Clark County Detention Center. Okay. Let's do a little history lesson here. Take us a little bit back to the beginning here. As a boy who grew up in Hamilton, how did you develop sort of the habit, not necessarily the addiction here, but the habit of gambling? It's a habit.

I loved entering contests. I loved it. Every contest I saw, I entered it. And you may think, well, who wins contests? Well, I won a lot of contests. You won a big one. I won multiple contests over and over and over again. And that was the problem right there.

I thought I couldn't lose. And these are just contests, coloring contests, you know. You're trying to stay in the lines. It's an innocent coloring contest to win like a stuffy or random contest where you just fill out a ballot and drop it in the ballot box. I kept winning. And I liked that.

rush, that dopamine hit, or whatever you want to call it. I loved it. It didn't really matter what the prize was either. I'm entering this contest. I want to be the winner. And that started at a young age. I was a kid. So I think that's where it all stems from.

And then, of course, OLG, which was OLC at the time, launches Sports Select Proline in the early 90s, and I'm in university. I loved watching sports. I'm a phys ed grad. I played sports. I watched sports. But now you can put $2 on this team and double your money for $5 or $10. The more you win, the more you increase your bets.

So that's how it all happened for me. And it got worse and worse. Well, when did it get to a point where you're talking, you're just saying $2. Right? But these numbers, you're talking about started to grow 100, 200. You're here taking a low. in a century from a casino for 10,000. Four casinos.

Total four, four casinos for 40,000. When did it start to feel like this was out of your control? I was winning early in those days, and I thought I had this, I thought I had this market, you know, wrapped up in a nice bow and box, and I knew all the answers to all the questions, and I just kept winning. And, you know, when you win, okay, well, you want to win more, so you start putting more on your bets. And that's what I was doing. So, but, but at the time, that way of doing it, there was a maximum bet you can put down and that was it, which was great. The restrictions were

fantastic. But I wanted more. So then I get introduced to my first bookie and bookies, total opposite from the way they're doing it legally with OLC. You couldn't bet as much money as you want. They don't care because they know in the long. run, you're going to be owing them that money, that cash. And for my first big bet, like I'm talking into the thousands of dollars, I had to win that one too. Of course. If I had lost that one, maybe it could be a different story.

It wouldn't be right in this book. But you know those wins, they keep you going. And then when you're losing a few times in a row, too, you're having in the back of your mind, well, the wind is just around, the wind is just around the corner. It's coming, you know. How do you keep, how did you keep your addiction hidden? No one knew. No one knew.

You hear you are on much music. You're on ET Canada. How did you manage to do that on camera and then deal with this in the background? I've always been a positive guy. Always put everything into whatever I do in life, whether it's my career, my family, this issue that I had for years. So I knew people. weren't going to be able to tell physically what I was going through.

It was a lot of stress, obviously, you know, especially if you're owing these bookies a lot of money at the end of the week, but I wasn't showing that. So it's hard to tell that someone's going through a gambling addiction unless you're seeing them at a casino 24-7. And that wasn't me. I was going to casinos here and there by myself. I was going to visit casinos when I was on work trips. Nobody knew. I was doing everything on my own. Wasn't bringing anyone with me, so it was easy to hide it. As I mentioned, a lot of people didn't know this story. I am curious. Why tell this story now? Well, this whole world of online gambling is getting out of control. It's a triple billion-digit dollar industry, like $100 billion last year. It's going to

double within five years. These guys aren't going anywhere. It's scary. It's scary. It's so accessible. When I was a teenager in my early 20s, it was a little more inconvenient. You know, you had to physically go somewhere. You had to fill out a ballot for your ticket. You had to go meet up with a bookie. You had to bring the bookie money or he had to bring you your money that you won. Everyone has a cell phone. Everyone has a device. You just download the app, insert your credit card, and your bank account could be drained to zero in a matter of minutes. It's too easy.

And I don't think the younger generation, I don't think they're prepared for this. Because when you lose control in this world of gambling, you really lose control, and you can ruin everything, your career, your life. Well, you talk a little bit about sort of the difference, you know, driving to meet your bookie to pay them, you know,

at some sketch mall in a back parking lot. Help me understand a little bit about the damage this did to your life. There were some casualties essentially in this journey. And we're on the other side of that now. But what damage did we do? Well, essentially, I think my first marriage broke down because I was so addicted to gambling and I was out of control at the time. Sure, there were other factors in that first marriage.

But I think if I was focused on my marriage, I wouldn't be running into problems of separation and divorce, but it was due to the gambling because that's all I wanted to do, and that's all I was doing. Other things like living paycheck to paycheck was happening, as soon as you get paid, you want to spend all that money on a sports bat. We're talking a fifth of your yearly salary or whatever that year. That first story was the biggest that I had gotten into it,

and that was early in my career. A sixth of my salary, I put on one game because now at that point I was able to get a gambling consultant who was telling me who to put my money on. So that was very, it was a very sketchy world that I had entered. You know, I first paid this guy a lot of money for his picks, basically. And then I was putting as much money as I could put together on these games that he was telling me to gamble on.

You talked about sort of the concerns that you have with sort of modern day gambling and sort of the access to it. Men and boys are especially susceptible. We see the ads. Every halftime show is not what it used to be. It is about odds and all of that. You also have two young sons. Young ones, yeah. What's one piece of advice that you give them to sort of navigate this new world knowing with what you've gone through?

See, a lot of people get into this gambling world for entertainment. You know, people are able to control it and they have willpower. They'll go with $20 into a casino when months that $20 is done, they walk out. There are people like that. There are a lot of people like that. But then there's the opposite. You lose 20. You go to the machine.

You grab another 20. Oh, you lost that. Let's get 100 this time. It's two total different extremes. My wife and I have taught our boys to, to go into everything with common sense, you know, everything in moderation. Sure, they may delve into this one day and explore for themselves, but we just don't want them to lose control in this world.

My older son, who I'm going to speak briefly about, he's my age now. He's the age now that I was when I was getting really into it. And this is before the much music years, it even started. So, and is there a concern there? No, because I talk to him all the time about the scary, the dark side of it all. So he's got a pretty good head and his shoulders. I'm going to have these same conversations with my two younger boys.

Obviously, not now. They're too young to know the details of this, but they know, in the general sense, what this book is all about. And they know that people struggle with addiction and struggle with hardships in life. Yes, this book is put out now as a cautionary. tale to those who think one day they may lose control. And I just want to scare people away from what could happen if you do lose control in that world, in any of those worlds of addiction. Rick, I appreciate you being honest and sharing your story.

I want to thank you so much for coming on the rent-down. My pleasure to be here. Thanks, John. Obviously, even before legalization on the Internet, there was problem gambling. But now it seems supercharged. You can bet in seconds from your phone, and if you watch sports, you're repeatedly exposed to advertising encouraging you to do it. And some leaders are taking notice.

For example, a proposed federal bill would lead to the development of a national framework to regulate sports betting advertising in Canada and set national standards for prevention of risk. So would that help combat addiction? And how do you know if someone is struggling? Robin Campbell, Nigel Turner, great to have you on the rundown. How are you doing? Very well, thank you. Bye. All right. Well, Nigel, I'm coming to you. You as a researcher at Camph have studied the psychology of gambling.

What concerns you about being able to bet on sports, entertainment, politics, from the ease of your phone? Well, one of the driving factors of an addiction is availability. The easier it is to access gambling opportunities, the more likely people are going to engage in that behavior. And it's a very rewarding behavior, at least when you win, it's rewarding. And our brain is set up to favor rewards over negative outcomes disproportionately so that we can get addicted to things even if they are, even if the winning is the exception, not the norm. Robert, you are part of a group called ban ads for gambling.

Some people are making the connection here to, to the push to ban tobacco ads. Yes. And what your group is doing. Are there similarities there? There absolutely are. And we focused on advertising because that is shown to be one of the things that can be most impactful if you ban the advertising for it, which they did for tobacco.

It took them a long time to come to that. And it took them realizing that they were having a public health crisis with tobacco. and it's addictive nature and the harm to the health. Well, the same thing is happening in rapid time with the gambling. We've got a public health crisis, and it's been promoted with the advertising. It's been normalized. When Nigel talks about the availability of the product,

cigarettes were very available, and the gambling apps, it's very available, and it's been normal. by the advertisements. When we talk about demographics, who these ads are being targeted to, is it a specific cohort here? Is there a group here?

Well, we believe that they started with, as soon as the criminal code was changed and single event sports betting was allowed. Sports betting and the ads grabbed particularly young men. And it was. really attracted them. It was lots of fun. And it's now moved to, and I think this was the original strategy. And I've heard people from the gambling industry talk about this. Grab them with the sports ads and the sports betting because young men, boys love sports. And once you get them

hooked on that, moves to online casino gambling. Nigel, how does the ease of betting turn into a habit where this is something where, you know, you are constantly checking your phone, whether it's at work or wherever it is, just constantly looking to place a bet or see what if you're a winner or not? Well, young people are very much attuned to the digital age and doing everything online. And so by pushing gambling, online gambling, this fits in well with the cultural, the culture of younger adults, whereas older people like me, myself, aren't as digitally savvy, so we're less likely to do that.

Now, you mentioned younger people being a bit savvy. I am curious, underage youth, finding ways to get around some of these restrictions as well, what should parents be doing to sort of look for symptoms? of addiction. We'll make sure you don't let your kids know your passwords. If you're going to be gamble online, don't share them. And monitor their behavior.

Monitor any activity in going online because there are gray market sites that don't scrutinize the age restrictions as well. Make sure they're not going, they're not setting up accounts on these, you know, these on either domestic or these gray market websites because they will spend a lot of money and lose a lot of money on these sites. That's actually the design of them is to make money. I think just picking up on that

and what parents should do, in addition to monitoring, I think they've got to talk to their kids about this issue and be very frank and upfront with them about it. And I think we need to have an educational program in the schools, starting quite young. And that really doesn't exist now. That's another area.

In our group, we have a number of educators, and that is a whole area that we really want to look into, is education about this problem. Can I push back a little bit? Because we're having this conversation because we're seeing these ads, and I am curious, could banning gambling ads create a false sense that the problem is solved?

and in some ways pushing people with addiction to gambling sort of into these shadows where, you know, we're not addressing these concerns. Well, if you ban the promotion of the products, there also has to be an educational advertising about this and making it easier to find help, making it more acceptable for people to seek help in this area. So I think there needs to be sort of public.

education about that, that kind of advertising. And public education about how games can be addictive, how gambling is addictive, because a lot of people don't understand that. No, they don't understand that it's the reward that creates the habit, and even though, and that happens, once it's established, can be resistant to a lot of losses because most people have a distorted understanding of their chances. They think that if they've been losing, while they're due to win, you never do to win. That's the simple math is the games are designed to make profit for the company, not for the player.

All right. I want to talk about Bill S-211. This is titled The National Framework on Sports Betting Advertising Act. What are you hoping will result, rather, from that bill? Well, if passed, and I think there is broad support against, among all parties for the bill. And what it would do is then, if passed, there would then be a year, I understand,

for the committee who's tasked with this to come up with a framework for regulating the advertising. But I would say a problem And that would be a good first step. We'd obviously be advocating for a ban, not just regulating them. You know, you can have an ad here, you can have an ad there, but an absolute ban, a la tobacco and cannabis. Okay.

That kind of ban. But the problem is Bill S211 addresses only sports betting ads. And I think it started when that was what the public attention was on, being deluged with sports betting ads. And as we've learned, and as I mentioned before, it's not just sports betting that's going on. It's online casino betting. Exactly.

The bulk, about 70% of helpline calls related to gambling, online gambling are not for sports. They're for casino games and slot machine games. Yeah. So we would like to, I don't know if it's possible, knowing about the legislative process, of amending that bill to be broader and to address not just sports betting advertising, but also all gambling advertising.

Well, Nigel, let's pick up on that. Does creating a national strategy for regulation go far enough? Obviously, Robin already says kind of they're not enough. There needs to be some amendments there and some changes, but what would you like to see? Does this have teeth? Well, yeah, I agree with Robin that we need to be broader, not just focused on sports. And it's something that I've said in numerous interviews, that it's not just about sports. It's about electronic slot machine type games.

It's about blackjack and other games betting online. And so we need something more comprehensive than just to focus on sports. Gambling is not going away, as you had mentioned, and only becoming easier. So I want to go through some recommendations. to help curb the harms. What would you suggest, whether it's to parents, whether it's two people who are gambling, what are you suggesting for them

if they are thinking about it or in the midst of it? Well, getting rid of the advertising and improving the age restrictions on the kids know how to get around those age restrictions. And also working, there is an international organization organization that is working at addressing the illegal gambling sites. This is an international problem. And I think time and attention spent in working with that group so that the illegal

sites don't just jump in with their advertising. I think that would help. Do you mind me asking very quickly, what is it, what's in it for you? Why is this the fight for you that you want to take part of? Well, a good question because I don't, thankfully, have in my own personal experience, an issue with this. But when we started, it was because Bruce Kidd, who was one of the founders of our organization, I knew him from U of T and my girls in sports there. And he was outraged at the poisoning of the culture of sport by these ads and this betting.

But that started us on a learning program. And the more we've read and the more we've heard about it, the more we've become concerned just as human beings about what this is doing to particularly young people. So it was really just a public interest development that started. started with the sports, but has grown since we've learned more. All right, Nigel, one recommendation to help curb the harms. I'd like to see more honesty in the ads. I'd like people to be made it crystal clear to the population

that gambling is about losing money. It's not about winning. That is what happens. There's a house edge behind every game. It's factored into the design of the game. It's part of sometimes it's hidden. Like you can't tell what the house edge is on a slot machine, but it's there. They just don't pay you enough when you do win for the times that you lose.

And I'd like to see more honesty about that. What is the house edge? And that's it. And this is how much you're going to lose every bet. So if it's, say, 9% house edge as it is in a lot of slot machines, that's 9% of every single bet. On average, you're going to lose. As I always say, the house always always...

Yes, it does. That's a very good quote. I'd love to pick up on that because the... And to have that kind of advertising, not the promotion. And what seems to have happened is that the responsible gambling messages have been put forward as an answer. Well, any research I've read indicates that responsible gambling messages do not work.

It's a blame the victim approach. and it's really inappropriate. So you have a sports star standing up and saying, talking about mentioning the word responsible gambling. Well, what a kid hears is, there's my hero telling me this is responsible. I can do this responsibly.

So that endorses the activity. All right. Well, we are going to have to leave it here. This is something that we are going to continue to follow. I really appreciate your time. Robin. Nigel, thank you so much for joining us on the rundown. Thank you.

I'm glad you're. I'm glad you're reporting on this story. Do you think legalized gambling has gone too far, or do you think it's a question of individual responsibility? Let us know in the comments or send us an email to rundown at tvO.org. Until then, I will see you next week. You're not imagining it. Historically, women's health has been under-researched and underfunded.

Did you know it took until the 90s for ADHD and girls to be studied, and it can take decades to be diagnosed with endometriosis? How did we get here? This season on Mestreated, we're exploring that and more. And speaking to those working on solutions. I'm NAM Kiwanuka. Watch Mastreated Thursdays at 8.30 p.m. on TVO, listen to the podcast, or stream us anytime.