MPs moving to restrict gambling ads in Canada
cbc.ca
cbc.ca
We also pass laws regulating murder/arson/theft even though those too can be avoided through self control.
When it comes to hard drugs I can understand why there are reasonable arguments for legalization of personal use.
Idk how many reasonable arguments extend the overton window to thinking that meth should be advertised seemingly all over the place. Because gambling ads are actually everywhere.
I find intrusive advertising toxic and want it all reduced or banned.
Not just tobacco and gambling ads, but everything else as well.
(No, I don't care that it is like advocating for democracy in 10th-century England and would entirely blow up how our economy currently "works")
So yeah it is on the scale of advertising meth.
I still don’t like calling personal self-inflicted non-chemical things a ‘public health crisis’ because it seems open to so many other things…. But if we ignore the terminology, we’d probably agree about the reality of it being a problem anyway. The lure of pointless semantic arguments is a public discourse crisis.
On a more depressing note, wasn't this always a thing? I remember being in 4th grade when a classmate brought in something called "Mise-o-jou", which was being run by the Quebec government.
I think the online element hates Gretzky because of something about the order of Canada but that does nothing to me and I honestly don't care. However, the gambling ads literally damage the fabric of the country and ruin the lives of average people, for a guy who made more in an year than many people made in a lifetime.
I would say it has a fair bit more to do with his cozying up to Trump
Sadly, no pond hockey games with my friends, because I had no friends, because I didn't support the Oilers. ;)
I've seen some interesting jobs pop up in Montreal and I'm starting to take French classes with the intent to possibly move there, but I'm not clear how much there's still the option to work in English in the city.
Sorry if it's a silly question, I'm Canadian by descent but have never lived in Canada, so I'm out of the loop on a lot of stuff.
That said, I live in Alberta now and normal serious parents tend to send their kids to French immersion. It's a leg up if you are going to get a government job, and it is pretty cool. That's not to say that John Q. Public is going to be happy if you are going to talk to him in French, but I think with the explosion of other languages in Alberta, the regressive types now are probably more accepting of it than they were before.
(Again this is just my observation, N=1, etc..)
Not really true, there is usually a very limited number of seats in french immersion. In the school district where I live, its a lottery system of who gets to go into french immersion as there are limited seats. Also you're implying that parents are not doing a good job if they don't send their kids to french immersion which is patently false.
> It's a leg up if you are going to get a government job, and it is pretty cool
In certain positions in the federal government, possibly. I know lots of people who work in provincial governments that don't know any french, and have never been required to know any.
This is just the latest in a long line of shit "The Great One" has done to be an embarrassment to Canada.
I could give two shits about the "public health crisis". People have agency, they can choose what to do with their lives and their money and I'm okay with the reaping and sowing lining up together.
I'm concerned in that I find the focus on gambling presented so prominently to be offensive, period. That is, I am offended. This is Just Wrong. I enjoy watching (some) sports, I appreciate the drama, I love the moments of superhuman feats and the balance of luck and skill and strategy and tactics and grand strategy and analysis and all of the things that it presents.
A friendly wager is fine, going by a sports book is fine once in a while. Even betting on an outcome on an online sports book is fine. It is a vice, sure, but who among us does not enjoy stepping outside the bounds of "proper" behavior. But this pervasive push to treat it as a normal and expected and typical thing offends me. It is a vice, and it should be done with the appropriate amount of shame and friction that we tolerate of almost all vices. It should not be normalized and it should not be glorified.
Heh, I wonder how this fits in with how AI thinks about it.
>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50197313
>Every AI model has the same “controversial” take on humans
You have far less agency than you think you do. We are automatons in so much of our behavior. You do what your parents tell you, your parents do what the church tells them, and you all buy ice cold Coca-Cola because the TV tells you to. In bulk we are statistically predictable. This is why we have laws against particular drugs, huge numbers of us will high ourselves to death and collapse the society around us. Society itself is a remover of agency. Animals can do whatever they want, humans are constrained socially in what we're allowed to do.
We really do have a false idea of who we are.
I guess it's possible, but you have no idea how much agency I think I have.
To focus on one example you give, "Society itself is a removed of agency. Animals can do whatever they want, humans are constrained socially in what we're allowed to do." -- this is a clear misunderstanding of what agency is, or at least how I am using it. You CAN do anything you are physically capable of doing, even in violation of society's rules. Complete agency! People desire things that are only obtainable through conformance with society's rules, or, more sociopathically, only obtainable through the appearance of conformance with society's rules. That society survives is in effect dependent on this fragile web of incentives and expectations and social consequences and martial consequences
You can choose not to drink Coke! That people statistically choose to drink Coke does not mean that people lack agency. If you think the reason people drink Coke is because TV tells you to, then I encourage you to create your own beverage and advertise the shit out it and then get super rich!
The problem is that there is a feeling that you have written out here: that manipulation of people's desires is somehow mechanistic or predictable.
That you can follow some script and get people to do something. But it only appears that way because you are looking at the survivors of the vicious evolution, red in tooth and branding. All the ads in the world didn't make Crystal Pepsi a winner (or frankly make Pepsi a winner). The combination of factors that makes one thing successful and another not cannot be easily replicated or copied from one domain to another or even within one domain.
If there were a mechanism then someone would be using it; everyone would be using it; and there would be no winners and everyone would be a winner. It's a self-contradictory view that doesn't match reality in any way.
"I could give two shits about the "public health crisis".
Have you thought about this for longer than a fraction of a second? Hope you don't bother to use any of our public education, health care, or other support systems.
Addiction to drugs, alcohol, and gambling is expensive for all of us in Canada.
I'm not seeing it for gambling. How is that expensive for anyone but the person doing the gambling?
How do we choose which pleasurable activities will be forbidden for the benefit of the minority who cannot safely enjoy them?
How is it that you live in society among others, presumably, yet are able to remain unaffected by the public health?
100% squashing gambling has generally not been successful, but the strategy of fencing it away from most of society and keeping it in a set of defined places that require people to actively seek it out has been successful enough that people forget why we don't allow gambling in every convenience store in the country. I'd say the additional "convenience" of having it in your pocket all the time is a new nuance, but doesn't necessarily change the fundamental equations.
We will relearn. Our grandchildren will forget again. (Unless things have really changed.)
In Ontario we do allow gambling in every convenience store in the province.
There are scratch tickets right there on the counter. There's the OLG machine for printing and checking lottery tickets and sports betting.
It has been this way for as long as I can remember, but it's never been in your face like the last few years.
Maybe we'll start repurposing the washrooms and stock rooms for poker tournaments soon.
Nobody is going to start a violent revolution over lottery tickets.
I do hold out some hope that in this pendulum swing we can land at least for a while on banning state sponsored gambling, though. It'll come back. Too appealing to keep down forever, unfortunately. I like to say it's a good exercise to sit down and really think about the difference between "organized crime" and a "government" but when a "government" does things like zealous defense of its gambling monopoly it does rather weaken the distinction....
Look at the birthrates and economic trajectory of the world. The grandchildren won't have the luxury of forgetting. They'll be living in the rubble.
The entire concept of sin taxes distorts the incentives for govs too much. If something is to be discouraged then do that, but do not have government revenue attached to people performing the discouraged activity.
Also jersey patch sponsor and a sponsored mention during the pre-game.
It seems like 50% of commercials are for gambling. If this goes away then the networks TV revenue will almost certainly go down and that has the potential to make the NHL TV rights less valuable to the networks.
The NHL wouldn't be alone here but of hte big 4 north American sports it the most exposed here.
Curling is basically the only sport I watch, and I'm on the fence about abandoning it due to gambling ads.
I was on the fence about ditching cable when all I watched was hockey, but I'm glad I did. So now, Rogers loses out on my $2500 a year (tv and internet), and I have more free time as they're not broadcasting games over the air anymore
I'm hoping that the PWHL version of HNIC doesn't have any gambling involvement at all, because kids watch it!
And at that - Sportsnet increasing its pricing (for what primarily serves NHL/NBA/MLB coverage that I've no interest in) was the final straw - this year I went through the hassle of obtaining a US-domiciled bank account and credit card purely so I can pay the $20/month for ESPN Select that broadcasts the same curling events as Sportsnet.
I don't love going through the US credit card and VPN hassle on my part, or handing my money to ESPN rather than a Canadian broadcaster, but I just can't abide what feels like the gouging on Rogers' part.
The fact that it was a lockout, and not a strike, that the lockout lasted a whole season, and that the players ended up voting like 90% in favour tells you which side the leverage is on.
The players might bring the majority of the value, but the current CBA sets the salary cap to basically a 50/50 split between players and owners.
It truly is cartel-like behavior, but I don't think the union can do much as long as hockey players want to make a lot of money playing hockey in North America.
yeah there are always lines of rubes on friday gettin their scratchers, but there is little directly evil dopamine manipulation you'd see on apps
Really though people should not tolerate it. Say what you will about the benefits but it is a regressive tax that preys upon people with a poor understanding of numbers and finance, I'm not sure how you can take a moral position that it is good. Historically it is even racist; these were made really to squash local numbers game rackets that were often found in minority communities. They essentially had a baked in market they captured using regulation to create a state owned monopoly over it. Same people you see buying lotto scratchers today would have been playing the numbers game a few generations ago.
You can't stamp out gambling completely but I find well run state lotteries preferable to sports betting apps, poker machines and any other digital gambling platform.
it seems unlikely they'd ban something so soon after legalizing.
I'm fine with gambling existing, but we dont need to manipulate people into doing addictive self-destructive vices they wouldn't already do.
Also the ads are super annoying.
every ad these days on TV specially during sports is either gambling, pharma - glp1s, some random medicine with obscene side effects or political ads. & fast-food or fast food delivery sprinkled in.
I completely agree with you. Watching gambling ads makes me irrationally angry. They should absolutely, 100% be banned from advertising, similarly/identical to cigarettes. Nuke them from orbit.
In 2026 we all know this stuff is bad for you, and we'd previously shunned the use and outright banned the advertisement of it - why are we opening the gates so that the next generations can get hooked after we'd somewhat successfully beat it back??
The Canadian provincial governments usually have a monopoly in running gambling services, and there is a strong case to be made that this is as much about ensuring that they keep making revenue from gambling as it is to reduce the ill effects of other gambling ads.
ex: https://www.canadiangamingbusiness.com/2026/10/22/new-brunsw...
Quelle surprise.
I say this is about an addiction and an health crisis problem. We should restrict these adds on the same grounds we restrict ads for other addictions such as tobacco.
We should prevent parasites from preying people.
Hell, making it a requirement that you be at a casino is probably another thing that should be looked into.