The History of Gambling Law in Canada
Gambling in Canada moved from a criminal offence to a provincial monopoly to, in two provinces so far, a competitively licensed private market — and it took just over a century of federal legislation to do it. The Criminal Code banned virtually all gambling from 1892 until a 1969 amendment let governments run lotteries; a 1985 federal–provincial deal then handed the provinces exclusive control, which is why Canada still has no single national gambling regulator. Ontario became the first province to license private online operators in April 2022, Alberta followed in July 2026, and every other province still runs its gambling market as a government monopoly. This page traces that legal evolution from pre-contact Indigenous gaming through to the current, still-fragmented, provincial patchwork.
Gaming before the Criminal Code existed
Games involving chance, wagering and skill were practised across North America long before European contact. Archaeological work on prehistoric dice — published in the journal American Antiquity — has identified more than 650 diagnostic and probable dice from 57 sites across the western United States and Canadian Plains, with the earliest examples dated to roughly 12,000–13,000 years before present, thousands of years older than the first dice known from the Old World. The same research frames these games as “social technologies of integration”: dice and guessing games gave otherwise unconnected groups a shared, language-independent way to trade, compete and build relationships.
Peoples across what is now Canada maintained their own distinct gaming traditions into the historic period — guessing games in which a hidden object had to be located, and dice or stone-toss games played with painted seeds, bone dice or carved pieces, often tied to specific seasons or gatherings. These practices are not incidental colour: they resurfaced directly in Canadian constitutional law more than a century later, when Anishinaabe First Nations cited their communities’ gaming customs as evidence in a Supreme Court case about whether Indigenous self-government includes authority over high-stakes gambling (discussed below). Colonial and later federal law did not build on these traditions — it displaced them, treating nearly all gambling, Indigenous or otherwise, as a criminal matter for the next century.
Colonial prohibition and Canada’s first Criminal Code
After Confederation in 1867, legislative authority over criminal law sat exclusively with the federal Parliament — a different constitutional design from the United States or Australia, where individual states retain that power. Canadian gambling law up to that point had been governed by inherited English common law and statutes prohibiting gaming houses, applied and adapted in Upper and Lower Canada. Canada then became the first jurisdiction in the British Empire to codify its own criminal law: the Criminal Code was enacted in 1892 and came into force in 1893, drawing on an unenacted British draft code as well as existing post-Confederation Canadian gambling statutes.
The Code’s gambling scheme, as it has been read by courts and commentators ever since, is not stated as a single blanket rule but emerges from reading the provisions together: gambling is prohibited except where the Code specifically carves out an exception. Offences relating to keeping a “common gaming house” or “betting house” (today section 201), and to betting, pool selling and bookmaking (section 202), sat alongside the lottery and games-of-chance offences that are now consolidated in section 206 — which still criminalises operating, advertising or participating in a lottery scheme, a game of three-card monte, or a game played with dice or bank cards for money, unless a specific exemption applies. One exemption existed from early on and still exists today: private bets between individuals not in the business of betting, and pari-mutuel wagering on horse races regulated by the federal Minister of Agriculture (now the Canadian Pari-Mutuel Agency), under what is now section 204. Until 1969, that pari-mutuel exception, together with small-stakes charitable lottery schemes, was essentially the entire legal gambling market in Canada.
1969: Parliament opens the door to lotteries
The Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1968–69 received royal assent on 27 June 1969 and, among many other criminal-law changes made that year, amended the Code’s lottery provisions for the first time in the Code’s history. Two things drove the change: the example of New Jersey’s newly introduced state lottery ticket system in the United States, and Quebec’s specific interest in raising money connected to the 1976 Montreal Olympics. The 1969 amendment permitted the federal government or a provincial government to conduct a broad range of “lottery schemes,” and allowed a narrower range of lottery schemes to be run by persons licensed by a province. The federal government could not, at that stage, license anyone else to run a lottery. Politically, the change was framed around “good causes” — proceeds were to flow to governments or to charitable and religious organisations, a public-revenue framing that still distinguishes Canadian gambling policy from the United States’ more common model of taxing privately-run casinos.
Provinces moved quickly. Quebec created Loto-Québec on 23 December 1969, and it held its first draw — a $2 Monthly Lottery with a $125,000 jackpot — on 14 March 1970, becoming Canada’s first modern provincial lottery. British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba pooled resources into the Western Canada Lottery Foundation, which began selling games in June 1974. Ontario followed by provincial statute in February 1975, launching its first game, Wintario, in April of that year. New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island incorporated the Atlantic Lottery Corporation in 1976. Within a decade of the 1969 amendment, every province had its own lottery corporation.
The federal–provincial lottery war and the 1985 settlement
The 1969 Code amendment let the federal government run lotteries too, and Ottawa used that power in a way that provinces found impossible to ignore. Under the Olympic (1976) Act, the federal government’s Olympic Corporation was authorised to conduct a lottery scheme to help finance the 1976 Montreal Games and amateur sport development; the resulting Loto-Canada ran nine draws between 1973 and 1976, raising roughly $230 million. The provinces regarded lotteries as their exclusive territory and objected strongly to a federal Crown corporation competing directly with their own lottery products.
The dispute was patched, not resolved, in 1979: the federal government agreed not to exercise its Code authority to conduct lottery schemes, and in exchange the provinces agreed to make the federal government a fixed annual payment. That truce broke down again in 1983, when Parliament amended the Code to let the federal government alone conduct a “pool betting operation.” Provinces argued this simply re-opened the same territory under a different label, and litigation followed. It took until 1985 for ministers to negotiate a full resolution: the federal government committed to introducing legislation repealing its own authority to conduct lottery schemes and pool betting operations, the provinces agreed to continue their annual payments under the 1979 deal, and the provinces further agreed to a one-time $100 million payment toward the 1988 Calgary Olympics. Parliament enacted that amending legislation — cited today as R.S.C. 1985 (1st Supp.), c. 52 — in December 1985, permanently removing the federal government’s own power to run lotteries and giving the provinces the exclusive authority over “lottery schemes” that section 207 of the Code still reflects. The same 1985 legislation also clarified that a province could itself conduct a lottery scheme through a computer, video device or slot machine, but could not license anyone else to do so — the provision that still requires every online provincial lottery product in Canada to be operated by, or under the direct “conduct and manage” control of, the provincial Crown corporation itself, rather than simply licensed out to a private operator.
The constitutionality of this whole arrangement was tested in R v Furtney, decided by the Supreme Court of Canada on 26 September 1991. The accused, charged over bingo-licence breaches, argued that section 207’s delegation of lottery authority to the provinces was an improper delegation of Parliament’s exclusive criminal-law power. The Court disagreed, holding that Parliament may validly condition the reach of its own criminal legislation on the existence of provincial licensing action without thereby delegating its law-making authority — Parliament, not the provinces, still defines what remains criminal. That reasoning is the legal foundation every provincial lottery corporation, and later every provincial iGaming framework, has relied on since.
A monopoly, coast to coast
The result of the 1969–1985 legislative sequence was a strictly provincial, monopoly-model gambling industry, and it stayed that way for decades. Alberta’s gambling and liquor functions were consolidated in 1996 into what is now the Alberta Gaming, Liquor and Cannabis Commission (renamed in 2018 to reflect cannabis regulation), merging what had previously been the Alberta Liquor Control Board, Alberta Lotteries and the Alberta Gaming Commission. British Columbia broke away from the Western Canada Lottery Foundation to form its own Crown corporation, BCLC, in October 1984, selling its first independent tickets on 1 April 1985; BCLC later launched PlayNow.com as Canada’s first legal online gambling platform. Physical casino gaming expanded on a similar timetable: Manitoba opened the first Canadian casino to offer slot machines in 1989, and Nova Scotia introduced video lottery terminals in bars in 1990. Loto-Québec opened its first casino, Casino de Montréal, in 1993, and launched its own online gaming site, Espacejeux, in December 2010.
Section 207 also lets provinces designate other bodies — including charitable and First Nations organisations — to issue lottery-scheme licences of the narrower kind the Code permits (small-stakes charity lotteries, fair and exhibition lotteries, and the like). Manitoba, Ontario and Quebec have used this to establish First Nations licensing bodies, and several provinces share proceeds from provincial casinos or slot machines with First Nations communities. None of this, however, gives any Indigenous government the authority to conduct or licence a full commercial casino or online gambling operation outside provincial control — a limitation that has been directly, and unsuccessfully, contested.
Kahnawà:ke and the question of Indigenous jurisdiction
The Mohawk Council of Kahnawà:ke, whose territory sits on the south shore of the St Lawrence River near Montreal, took a different route. Rather than seeking a licence under Quebec’s provincial framework, it enacted its own Kahnawake Gaming Law and established the Kahnawà:ke Gaming Commission on 10 June 1996, grounding its authority not in the Criminal Code but in the community’s own assertion of sovereignty over its territory — a position the Commission describes by noting that “the Mohawks of Kahnawà:ke have consistently and historically asserted sovereignty and jurisdiction over their territory” and have never signed a treaty ceding it. The Commission began licensing online gambling operators under its Interactive Gaming Regulations on 8 July 1999, making it one of the first regulators anywhere in the world to license internet casinos — years before any Canadian province considered doing so.
This is a genuine, unresolved jurisdictional fault line, not a settled question. In 1996, the same year the Kahnawà:ke Gaming Commission was created, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled on a related but distinct question in R v Pamajewon (14 March 1996): could the constitutionally protected Aboriginal right to self-government, recognised under section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982, extend to regulating high-stakes gambling on reserve land? Two Ontario First Nations, Eagle Lake and Shawanaga, had each passed their own by-laws authorising high-stakes bingo and were charged with keeping a common gaming house under the Code. The Court applied the same test used for any claimed Aboriginal right — whether the activity is a practice, custom or tradition integral to the distinctive pre-contact culture of the claimant community — and found that high-stakes commercial gambling did not meet that test, even though evidence of gaming traditions in Anishinaabe culture was put before the Court. The claimed right to self-regulate gambling was rejected. A Quebec Superior Court decision in 2007, in a narrower dispute over a Kahnawà:ke Gaming Commission permit refusal, ruled in the Commission’s favour on the facts of that case but explicitly declined to rule on the underlying validity of the Kahnawake Gaming Law itself.
The dispute resurfaced in direct, modern form once Ontario opened its competitive iGaming market. On 28 November 2022, the Mohawk Council of Kahnawà:ke sued iGaming Ontario and Ontario’s Attorney General, arguing that Ontario’s model — private operators doing the operational work under contracts with iGaming Ontario — did not satisfy the Code’s requirement, under section 207, that lottery schemes be “conducted and managed” by the province itself, and that this made the entire Ontario framework unlawful and, by extension, no bar to Kahnawà:ke-licensed operators serving Ontario players. The Ontario Superior Court of Justice dismissed the challenge in a decision reported as 2024 ONSC 2726, adopting a functional reading of “conduct and manage”: the province does not need to run every operational detail itself, but it must retain enough direction and control to remain what the court called the “operating mind” of the scheme. The Mohawk Council of Kahnawà:ke chose not to appeal, saying it would pursue its interests in gaming through other channels instead. As of 2026, no court has ruled on the broader question of whether Kahnawà:ke’s own licensing authority is valid under Canadian law — only that Ontario’s own framework is.
The offshore era: why grey-market gambling persisted
Because the Criminal Code targets conducting or managing a gambling operation, not simply placing a bet, Canadian law has never squarely made it a criminal offence for an individual to gamble on a website operated from outside the country. That gap — combined with the fact that no province offered a real online casino product until BCLC’s PlayNow and, decades later, Ontario’s competitive market — is why offshore-licensed operators, including Kahnawà:ke-licensed sites and operators licensed in jurisdictions such as Malta and Curaçao, spent roughly two decades serving Canadian players with little practical interference, regardless of whether any Canadian regulator recognised their licence.
Quebec made the most direct legislative attempt to close that gap. In May 2016 it passed Bill 74, amending its Consumer Protection Act to require internet service providers to block access to online gambling sites not licensed by Loto-Québec, based on a blocklist the government would supply. Quebec’s Superior Court ruled the scheme unconstitutional on 24 July 2018, finding that its true object and effect reached into two areas of exclusive federal jurisdiction — telecommunications and criminal law — rather than genuine provincial consumer protection. Quebec appealed, but the Quebec Court of Appeal upheld the finding of unconstitutionality on 17 June 2021 (2021 QCCA 730), holding that a province cannot regulate internet service providers in their capacity as telecommunications intermediaries, and noting that the legislative record pointed to protecting Loto-Québec’s own revenue rather than protecting consumers. No Canadian province has attempted mandatory ISP-level blocking of gambling sites since.
Bill C-218: the end of parlay-only sports betting
For decades, the Code’s lottery-scheme exception was read to permit only “parlay” sports betting — wagers requiring a bettor to correctly pick the outcome of two or more linked events, as sold through provincial products such as Ontario’s Proline. Betting on the outcome of a single game or match was not a permitted lottery scheme and remained a criminal offence, which is precisely why offshore and Kahnawà:ke-licensed single-event sportsbooks had a genuine commercial market among Canadian bettors for so long.
That changed with Bill C-218, the Safe and Regulated Sports Betting Act, a private member’s bill sponsored by Conservative MP Kevin Waugh. It passed the House of Commons at third reading on 22 April 2021, cleared the Senate on 22 June 2021, and received royal assent on 29 June 2021 as Statutes of Canada 2021, c. 20. The Criminal Code amendments came into force on 27 August 2021, removing single-event sports betting from the Code’s list of prohibited activities and leaving its regulation entirely to the provinces under their existing section 207 authority. Every provincial lottery corporation subsequently added single-event betting to its existing sports-betting products — but the underlying “conduct and manage” constraint from 1985 did not change, which is exactly what set up Ontario’s next move.
Ontario opens a competitive market — April 2022
Ontario used the post-C-218 window to do something no province had done before: open its market to competing, privately operated, AGCO-registered gambling websites rather than confining online gambling to a single provincial monopoly product. iGaming Ontario, a subsidiary of the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario, launched the new framework on 4 April 2022. In its own announcement, iGaming Ontario acknowledged the obvious backdrop: “most internet gaming by Ontarians takes place on websites not conducted and managed by the province” — the point of the new framework was to bring that existing, largely offshore-facing demand inside a regulated, AGCO-registered structure, with standards covering game integrity, underage-access prevention, anti-money-laundering compliance and responsible-gambling tools. Roughly a dozen operators, covering just over twenty individual gaming websites, launched in the market’s first days.
The market has grown substantially since. iGaming Ontario’s own figures for the fiscal year ended 31 March 2025 show 50 registered operators active during the year (up from roughly a dozen at launch), 2.6 million player accounts with wagering activity, $82.7 billion in total wagers (up 32% year-on-year) and $2.9 billion in total gaming revenue (up 31%), split roughly $2.2 billion from online casino products, $654 million from betting and $59 million from peer-to-peer poker. A joint AGCO/iGaming Ontario study covering January–February 2025 estimated that 83.7% of Ontario online gamblers were playing on a regulated, AGCO-registered site — the clearest available measure of how far a competitive licensing model can shift activity away from unregulated operators, though it also confirms that a meaningful share of Ontario play still occurs outside the regulated market.
Alberta follows: 2025–2026
Alberta became the second province to move to a competitive private iGaming model. Alberta’s Minister of Service Alberta and Red Tape Reduction introduced Bill 48, the iGaming Alberta Act, on 26 March 2025; it received royal assent on 15 May 2025. The Act created the Alberta iGaming Corporation (AiGC) as the Crown entity responsible for conducting and managing the new market, with the existing Alberta Gaming, Liquor and Cannabis Commission (AGLC) acting as regulator — deliberately mirroring the “operator plus separate regulator” structure Ontario had already tested and had survive its Kahnawà:ke court challenge. Alberta’s own government materials estimated that unlicensed operators were already capturing roughly 70% of the province’s existing online gambling activity before the new market opened, which was the central economic argument for regulating rather than continuing to prohibit it.
The Alberta market launched on 13 July 2026. Twenty-two operator websites went live on day one — out of roughly fifty entities that had paid registration fees in the lead-up to launch — including major North American sportsbook and casino brands. Alberta’s framework includes a centralised self-exclusion programme and, unlike Ontario, an explicit prohibition on election betting; net revenue is split with the government retaining 20% after a 3% allocation to First Nations and social-responsibility initiatives from gross gaming revenue.
Where things stand in 2026
As of mid-2026, Canada does not have a national online gambling framework, and is unlikely to get one under the current constitutional division of powers — the Criminal Code sets the outer limits of what can be permitted, but each province decides whether, and how, to operate within them. That produces a genuinely uneven map:
- Ontario and Alberta run competitive, multi-operator private markets, regulated respectively by the AGCO/iGaming Ontario and the AGLC/Alberta iGaming Corporation.
- British Columbia, Manitoba and Saskatchewan restrict legal online gambling to BCLC’s single PlayNow.com platform, operated as a government monopoly.
- Quebec restricts legal online gambling to Loto-Québec’s Espacejeux platform, the same monopoly model it has defended in litigation over ISP blocking.
- New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland and Labrador operate through the Atlantic Lottery Corporation, also on a monopoly basis, without a competitive online casino market.
- Single-event sports betting is legal nationwide, sold through each province’s own lottery-corporation sportsbook product since the Bill C-218 amendments took effect in August 2021.
- Offshore-licensed and Kahnawà:ke-licensed operators remain accessible to Canadians outside Ontario and Alberta’s registered markets; playing on them is not itself a Criminal Code offence, but such sites are not registered with, audited by, or accountable to any Canadian provincial regulator.
Key dates
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 1892 / 1893 | Canada’s first Criminal Code enacted (1892) and brought into force (1893), codifying a general prohibition on gambling subject to narrow exceptions. |
| 1969 | Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1968–69 (royal assent 27 June 1969) lets federal and provincial governments conduct lottery schemes for the first time. |
| 1969–1976 | Provincial lottery corporations established: Loto-Québec (1969), Western Canada Lottery Foundation (1974), Ontario Lottery Corporation (1975), Atlantic Lottery Corporation (1976). |
| 1976 | Federal Loto-Canada launches an Olympic lottery, triggering a jurisdictional dispute with the provinces. |
| 1979 | Federal government agrees to step back from running lotteries in exchange for fixed annual provincial payments. |
| 1985 | Parliament repeals its own lottery authority (R.S.C. 1985 (1st Supp.), c. 52), giving provinces exclusive control; BCLC splits from the Western Canada consortium. |
| 1991 | R v Furtney: Supreme Court of Canada upholds the constitutionality of provincial lottery-scheme licensing under section 207. |
| 1996 | Kahnawà:ke Gaming Commission established; R v Pamajewon holds that Aboriginal self-government rights under section 35 do not extend to regulating high-stakes gambling. |
| 1999 | Kahnawà:ke Gaming Commission begins licensing online gambling operators. |
| 2021 | Bill C-218 legalises single-event sports betting nationwide, in force 27 August 2021. |
| 2022 | Ontario opens Canada’s first competitive, privately-operated online gambling market (4 April 2022). |
| 2024 | Ontario Superior Court rejects the Mohawk Council of Kahnawà:ke’s legal challenge to Ontario’s iGaming framework (2024 ONSC 2726). |
| 2026 | Alberta opens its own competitive iGaming market (13 July 2026), becoming the second province to do so. |
Sources
- Criminal Code, RSC 1985, c C-46, s. 207 (Justice Laws Website) — text of the permitted lottery-scheme exceptions and the provincial “conduct and manage” framework.
- Criminal Code, RSC 1985, c C-46, s. 206 (Justice Laws Website) — text of the general offences relating to lotteries and games of chance.
- Olympic (1976) Act, SC 1973-74, c. 31 (Justice Laws Website) — confirms the federal Olympic Corporation’s lottery authority for the 1976 Montreal Games.
- AGCO, “Conduct and manage in the Criminal Code” — regulator explanation of the section 207 “conduct and manage” test.
- AGCO news release on Bill C-218’s proclamation — confirms the 27 August 2021 in-force date and Ontario’s regulatory response.
- Hal Pruden, “An Overview of the Gambling Provisions in Canadian Criminal Law and First Nations Gambling,” Journal of Aboriginal Economic Development, Vol 2, No 2 (2002) — Department of Justice counsel’s account of the 1892 Code, the 1969, 1979, 1983 and 1985 amendments, and early casino/VLT expansion.
- “The History of the Law of Gaming in Canada” (University of Calgary repository) — background on colonial-era English gaming statutes applied in Upper and Lower Canada and the 1892 codification.
- Kahnawà:ke Gaming Commission, FAQ — the Commission’s own account of its 10 June 1996 establishment, its sovereignty-based legal basis, and online licensing since 8 July 1999.
- LEGISinfo, Bill C-218 (43rd Parliament, 2nd session) — legislative history: sponsor, readings, and 29 June 2021 royal assent.
- Loto-Québec, “Our history” — 23 December 1969 founding, first draw on 14 March 1970, and later casino/Espacejeux milestones.
- OLG, corporate history 1975–1989 — February 1975 founding of the Ontario Lottery Corporation and the April 1975 Wintario launch.
- NASPL member profile, BCLC — BCLC’s October 1984 founding and 1 April 1985 split from the Western Canada Lottery Foundation.
- R v Furtney, [1991] 3 SCR 89 — Supreme Court of Canada decision (26 September 1991) upholding the constitutionality of section 207.
- R v Pamajewon, [1996] 2 SCR 821 — full text of the Supreme Court’s 14 March 1996 decision on Aboriginal self-government and high-stakes gambling.
- Ifrah Law, “Ontario Lottery Survives Legal Challenge by the Mohawk Council of the Kahnawake” — analysis of the 2024 ONSC 2726 decision and the “conduct and manage” reasoning.
- CDC Gaming, “Ontario First Nation won’t appeal court decision against it in online gaming case” — confirms the Mohawk Council of Kahnawà:ke’s decision not to appeal.
- Mondaq, “Québec Court Of Appeal Strikes Down Provincial Site-blocking Law” — the 17 June 2021 Quebec Court of Appeal decision on Bill 74 (2021 QCCA 730).
- iGaming Ontario, “Ontario’s New iGaming Market to Launch April 4, 2022” — Ontario’s own launch announcement and market rationale.
- iGaming Ontario, Annual Report 2024–2025 — FY2024-25 wagers, revenue, operator count and channelization figures.
- Government of Alberta, “Alberta’s iGaming Strategy” — official description of the AiGC/AGLC framework, the 13 July 2026 launch date and market-share figures.
- “Probability in the Pleistocene,” American Antiquity — archaeological evidence for the antiquity and social role of dice games in pre-contact North America.