Mr. Speaker, I am truly honoured to have the opportunity to speak in favour of Bill S-211 today, an act respecting a national framework on sports betting, for many of the reasons we have heard already this evening.
I am not someone who spends a lot of time watching professional sports, I will admit, but they are often on my TV when I am home with my family, and even I have noticed that sports betting ads are ubiquitous. It has become a topic of conversation in our house that people are not just watching sports anymore; they are participating with their money. They can bet on the next play of the football game they are watching or how many points a professional baseball player might make. Every few minutes, there is an ad encouraging Canadians to gamble, because watching sports seems to no longer be enough of an experience in itself.
Our sports, sports figures and teams are part of our national identity. Sports have long brought Canadians together, and now Canadians have to navigate endless gambling advertisements in order to watch a game or a competition. For many people, this presents a risky temptation.
Back in the early 2000s, when I was a journalist, I got to know a prominent Hamilton man who lost his career due to a gambling addiction. We spoke at length about this, and he introduced me to some of the men he had met at Gamblers Anonymous. All of them were people who had important careers until they lost everything due to their gambling addictions, including a lawyer who was supposed to be appointed to the Superior Court bench the same day that police were raiding his offices to find evidence that he had stolen money from clients to fuel his gambling addiction.
We did a whole long TV series about this, and these people told me how difficult it was to resist when they were routinely bombarded by advertising that compelled them to keep spending money at casinos and other gambling venues. Remember, this was back in the early 2000s. It was before the tsunami of social media and the avalanche of betting sites we have available online today.
Today the world is different. We know this. It is not just adults in the prime of their careers who are falling into destitution and despair due to addictive behaviours. Elderly people, vulnerable people and people susceptible to mental and physical harms are all being bombarded with the same sports advertising. Today children are glued to their devices. They are watching sports and, inevitably, are fed a constant stream of sports betting advertising. Gambling has become normalized as a part of sports. This is what our children are learning as they grow up.
I chair the permanent Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage. We recently completed a study on the impacts of social media on young people, and we heard that many online applications used by children encourage addictive behaviour. The gamification of everything means that our kids are becoming addicted to their favourite vice earlier and earlier in life. They are learning how to become addicts.
We heard this testimony from several witnesses. For example, Maude Bonenfant, the Canada Research Chair in Gaming, Technologies and Society and a professor at the Université du Québec à Montréal, told us that platforms use games of chance and money. They use gambling as a strategy to keep users engaged as long as possible, and the line between video games and gambling is becoming increasingly blurred, so video games are becoming more like gambling. There is more betting within video games, and the algorithms are increasingly sophisticated, with the aim of keeping kids immersed in online content through gambling.
Michael Cooper from Mental Health Research Canada told us that one addictive behaviour can be a catalyst for another addictive behaviour. For example, people who spend more than six hours online are more than twice as likely to be at high risk for alcohol and cannabis abuse and a host of other addictions. The same is true for gambling. This normalizing of gambling in everyday life can mean, according to Cooper, that our ability to regulate ourselves in the face of temptation is broken.
Today, we are inundated with enticements to gamble, particularly in sports. Bill S-211 is a first step in preserving the integrity of the sports culture in Canada, but it is also about preserving the mental health of Canadians.
Our colleague from Waterloo and other members have spoken about the former Bill C-218, the Safe and Regulated Sports Betting Act. This was something Parliament brought and became law in 2021, because before that, all we had was black-market bookies with ties to criminal organizations.
The bill was an attempt to put the industry under the purview of the provinces so that it had greater oversight. However, today, only Ontario in Canada authorizes third party gambling operators, as we have heard several times tonight, and sports betting operators have taken full advantage. They have purchased oodles of ad space on regional and national broadcasts, particularly on sports channels during sporting events. Some estimates say that we are subjected to three gambling ads every minute while we are watching sports on TV. We now see sports betting ads even when we are watching live. They appear on athletes' jerseys and on the boards around the ice rinks.
In Canada today, we have more than 19 million active online gamblers. This is one of our fastest-growing industries. Canada rates eighth in the world for the most money spent on gambling, about $4 billion every year.
Also, as I impressed upon this chamber earlier, children, teens and vulnerable people are also watching these games. They are talking about the experience the next day with their friends and their community. Do we really want them to think of gambling as a normal part of taking in a sporting activity, or even that a person has not really experienced a game if they have not put some money down on an outcome or player? We need to deeply consider whether we want important, healthy Canadian cultural institutions to be intertwined with the often harmful habit of gambling.
Research shows that the more we are exposed to gambling ads, the more positive our attitude becomes toward gambling, intentions to gamble become greater and gambling activities increase. The Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction found that almost one in four young people who bet online reported harms due to gambling behaviour, and that online sports betting is associated with double the risk of gambling harms compared to other forms of gambling. Also, sports betting advertising is four times more appealing to children than adults.
I learned a lot about the significant impacts that problem gamblers face when I did that news series 25 years ago: impacts on their own health, on their mental health and on their well-being, and equal impacts on their family and their loved ones. Problem gamblers are four times more likely to have anxiety and depression, and seven times as likely to have planned suicide in the past 12 months. Excessive advertising can exacerbate all of these issues, as I heard from problem gamblers, and that was a quarter century ago, long before the onslaught of the advertising we face today. Researchers say that there is a possibility of a connection between the extent of exposure to advertising and the intensity of the gambling addiction.
Bill S-211 asks the federal government to establish a national framework, regulate sports betting advertising, provide tools for the prevention and diagnosis of gambling and support those who are impacted by a harmful gambling addiction.
Canadians agree that something should be done. In 2024, a poll by Maru Group found that most Canadians have a negative attitude toward gambling ads: 75% say that we need to protect children and youth from gambling ads, 66% say that those commercials should not be allowed during live broadcasts and 59% believe in a national ban on this type of advertising. When we pair gambling with the broadcast of a game, we normalize sports betting as an integral part of the sport experience. It is not.
I will leave members with words from Bruce Kidd, a retired professor of sports policy. He wrote an article in The Globe and Mail on February 7, in which he established that about four million Canadians, the population of about Alberta, are at risk of a gambling addiction. He said:
Think about multiples of the number of people who watch a Blue Jays game in Rogers Stadium. And then think about their families. If we fail to pass Bill S-211, those will be the numbers of...people we’ll have abandoned to the careless greed of the advertisers who think they’re doing their part by saying over and over again—and disingenuously, of course—“Please gamble responsibly.”