© Provided by National Post Screen grab from Aaron Paul’s gambling commercial for bet365.
Online gambling is a massive growth industry. VIXIO Gambling Compliance predicts that what was a $1.6-billion Canadian market in 2022 will become a $3.3-billion market by 2026 — driven in particular by Ontario, which alone among provinces has licensed dozens of private gambling companies to operate on its territory. Viewers of the NHL playoffs will not have failed to notice this, in the same way they wouldn’t fail to notice being cross-checked in the face by, say, Chris Pronger. The advertising is utterly relentless.
At commercial breaks, Wayne Gretzky and Connor McDavid team up to promote BetMGM. Pronger, the retired NHL defenceman, shills for Sports Interaction. Retired NHL goalie Kevin Weekes promotes DraftKings. Breaking Bad actor Aaron Paul reps Bet365, just to add a bit of Hollywood glam. (Bet99 signed up the Leafs’ Auston Matthews last year, while teammate Mitch Marner signed on with Sports Interaction — though I’ve yet to see either in any ads.)
The spot on the ice where a Stanley Cup Playoffs logo used to sit is now ad space for Bet365. Various online sportsbooks take their turns on the NHL’s new digital boards. And perhaps most jarringly, broadcasts including Sportsnet’s Hockey Night in Canada (HNIC) have subsumed gambling into their game coverage. In the same way HNIC panellists Kevin Bieksa and Kelly Hrudey analyze the previous period’s goals, hits and penalty kills, Cabbie Richards, Sportsnet’s executive director of betting content, gives viewers excited updates about what they should be gambling on at that red-hot second.
Never having had any interest in gambling, never having had to deal with a loved one stricken with a gambling addiction, I can at least appreciate the phenomenon as black comedy. I don’t think I’m imagining the hint of guilt in Hockey Night host Ron MacLean’s voice when he throws to Richards — as if he’s imagining what a favourite grandparent might think about it. Pokerstars ran an ad Monday night that couldn’t possibly be parodied: It wisely observed that responsible gamblers have other hobbies, and illustrated this with a middle-aged man playing poker on his tablet while he’s out fishing .
If I had kids, though, I think I would be properly hacked off. Other parents sure seem to be, and with good reason. Can’t we just watch a hockey game?
A cursory review of existing research suggests sports gambling can be a particularly insidious threat to problem and at-risk gamblers — and that’s intuitive. “Unlike traditional gambling… sports betting adds the emotion of the game — a favourite athlete or team — to the wager considerations,” the Responsible Gambling Council warned the House of Commons committee studying Bill C-218, which liberalized Canada’s sports-betting market two years ago. “The emotion associated with the heat-of-the-moment game play can make informed decision-making about spend and time spent playing more difficult.”
Research from Australia , where the National Rugby League (NRL) and Australian Football League (AFL) have been very much in league with Big Sportsbook, not surprisingly found that problem gamblers were the most receptive to in-game gambling cues such as in-studio shilling (like Richards’) and the promotion of “novelty” (read: suckers’) bets. “Given the increasing growth of sports betting, early evidence of increased sports betting problems, and the inability to avoid gambling advertising while engaging in the highly popular pastime of watching televised sport, further research is critical,” the researchers wisely observe.
The situation in Canada is, at the very least, objectively odd. We have placed very strict limits on advertising for alcohol and tobacco — both former mainstays of hockey broadcasting, though they were never integrated into the game itself. Dave Hodge never encouraged us to chug a beer or hack a dart every time Guy Lafleur scored a goal.
Canada liberalized sports betting — until C-18, even just betting on a single game (as opposed to multiple games) was forbidden — for the same basic reason it legalized marijuana: Canadians were betting on sports anyway, mostly using offshore sportsbooks, but governments weren’t getting the cut they felt owed. But the restrictions on cannabis advertising are just as strict as those on alcohol and tobacco, if not more so.
Among the myriad rules: You can’t use celebrities to sell weed. That’s a rule the United Kingdom introduced for sportsbook advertising last year, and that many have argued for in Australia. The Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario (ACGO) wants to prohibit it in the province, too. And that’s the major difference between gambling and the other regulated vices: The advertising rules are mostly up to the provinces — but only in theory. Ontarians being the dominant audience for Hockey Night in Canada, for example, Canadian hockey fans in other provinces are being force-fed advertising for services they can’t even legally use.
For Ontarians’ sake, and for the greater good, Queen’s Park needs to get on this case. Addiction is a huge political issue nowadays, after all, and the status quo is not at all popular: An Ipsos poll conducted last year found just 22 per cent of respondents disagreed with putting restrictions on gambling advertising. Even just taking celebrities out of the equation, or banning ads before a certain time, would dull the nightly onslaught. But if precedent on booze, weed and smokes were to hold, the restrictions would be much tougher than that.