By Bruce Kidd

Published in Globe and Mail, August 12, 2024

It’s hard to imagine a current public policy more harmful than the promotion of ‘responsible gambling’. That’s the Ontario Government’s and the gambling industry’s strategy to divert responsibility for the addictions and economic and social costs of sports betting and other forms of gambling, including casinos and lottery tickets. The idea, pushed out in endless ads and taglines, endorsed by star athletes like Connor McDavid, the most valuable player of the recent Stanley Cup playoffs, is that bettors should know their financial and psychological limits and rein themselves in when at risk. Meanwhile, the gambling industry pours out the inducements to bet, weaponizes the digital media to induce addictions, and strips countless bettors of their money.

Gambling can be very harmful. According to Statistics Canada, 1.6% of adult gamblers in Canada, or 304,400 persons, are at moderate to high risk of gambling disorders, including mental health issues, runaway debt, stress to families, low self-esteem, anxiety, depression, and even suicide. The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) in Toronto estimates that 1.2 percent of Ontario adults and 1.7% of high-school students in the province are experiencing, or at risk for, gambling problems. Problem gambling tends to be highest in younger males with lower levels of income and education.

CAMH also reports that for every person experiencing gambling problems, another 5 to 10 people are negatively affected, with harms to mental health and financial security especially common.

The system is designed to addict. According to Steve Joordens of the University of Toronto Scarborough, the gambling industry exploits the psychological power of random rewards, and manipulates the endless possibilities of cell-phone prop bets into compulsion. ‘When players gamble, they lose more often than they win,’ he says. ‘The random nature of wins means they never know when that next win is coming.  They start chasing that next win.  At the neuroscientific level, the hormone dopamine is released when one is chasing a desired outcome and this release feels good, literally the thrill of the chase.  Each loss can make the player feel one step closer to that next win, which always feels like it’s just around the corner.  This makes the player “resistant to extinction”.  Once they start, they don’t want to stop, especially after a string of losses.’

The Globe and Mail recently reported a significant increase in the number of gamblers seeking help at Ontario’s only in-patient treatment program, the Residential Centre for Problem Gambling and Digital Dependency at Hotel-Dieu Grace Healthcare in Windsor. We would know more about the extent of the problem, except that in 2019 the Ontario government eliminated funding for Gambling Research Exchange Ontario, a key organization that researched and provided resources for problem gambling prevention.

The ads enticing bettors are impossible to escape. The CBC recently reported that that one can expect to see three gambling ads a minute during a game broadcast. The private broadcasters promote betting enthusiastically. While the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario prohibits ads directed at young people, that hasn’t stopped ads on sports telecasts and in arenas and stadia where children and youth watch and attend in great numbers. It was only when the Campaign to Ban Ads for Gambling formally complained to the AGCO about ads on sign boards and dressing room doors in a youth hockey arena that it persuaded the betting company to take them down.

‘Responsible gambling’ is thus more than an oxymoron. It normalizes a highly risky endeavour, and marshals a ‘blame the victim’ approach, placing the onus for the mental health and other problems associated with gambling on the individuals and families who suffer. The governments and corporations that legalized and profit from gambling take little or no responsibility for gambling harms.

We thus have a public health crisis being passed off as a problem of individual responsibility. What is needed instead, experts agree, is a comprehensive, holistic, public health approach, just as Canada eventually took with tobacco. The governments that created the problem have a responsibility to fix it.

Governments need to limit the inducements to gamble, by banning the ads outright, in the same way that they previously banned ads for tobacco. There is now a private member’s bill to regulate gambling ads in the Canadian Senate. The federal Liberals should make that a Government bill and turn it into law.

Secondly, the federal and provincial/territorial governments should conduct public education campaigns to reverse the normalization of sports betting and other forms of gambling, just as it once did for tobacco.

Thirdly, governments need to hold the betting companies responsible for the full costs of the social problems they create.

A former Olympian, Bruce Kidd is a member of the Campaign to Ban Ads for Gambling, and a professor emeritus of sports policy at the University of Toronto.