There are a number of things that cycle because the solution ends up being successful enough that the next generation doesn't realize there is a problem being solved. Chesterton's Fence, except on a generational timescale it's Chesterton's Oscillating Fence.
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.)
Lottery tickets at least avoid the worst aspects of the real time feedback that things like slot machines can give. Though scratchoffs certainly get closer.
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....
I can't shake sonething I read in one of Terry Pratchett's books. In it, a character convinces a barbarian horde that it is a bad idea to descend on farmers, kill them all, and take their belongings. It is better to keep them alive, and collect 30% of their belongings each year perpetually. The connection between politics and crime is very close.
If they actually operated in a disinterested way, sure, but how many different forms of advertising do you see the lotto being promoted in? Doesn't seem disinterested to me.
What? States make buckets of money from gambling. They typically claimed it was "for education" but money is fungible and our other taxes never went down, so anything it offsets in one budget just leaves more money for other budgets.
I read your second sentence but I don't get it. Isn't generating profit for the state literally the entire point of the lottery? Who is arguing that it doesn't do that in theory or practice?
Ditto, this is a cancer. Wayne Gretzky is dead to me because of his support of these ads. The greatest Canadian athlete of the 80s and 90s is now Bret "The Hitman" Hart.
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.
While sports betting was allowed, in the past I don't think it was allowed to be advertised beyond like lottery displays. You would not see ads during Hockey Night in Canada for it either on the boards or during breaks. Now they are all over and run by third parties.
I am from Montreal and (I can't believe this but it is 100% true) I was bullied in my (English-speaking) Montreal-area grade school for wearing non-Oilers merch. I was pleased when he left. (Yes, this is the home of Rocket Richard, the Pocket Rocket, Jean Beliveau, Guy Lafleur and Patrick Roy at the time)
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.
Tangentially related, but I'm curious. How does bilingualism in Montreal work out in practice? I know most of the rest of Quebec is very Francophone, but Montreal is more bilingual.
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.
I'm not the best person to ask, but the last I heard, New Brunswick is the only officially bilingual province. The rest are either French or English only. (It was a news story when the premier of Manitoba spoke in French in his legislature a few weeks back).
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.
> That said, I live in Alberta now and normal serious parents tend to send their kids to French immersion.
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.
The ostensible reason provided (at least according to press reports at the time) was to divert people from offshore gambling operations, allowing the government to capture revenue as well as protect consumers. That argument isn't entirely without merit either. The US supreme court legalized sports gambling in 2018, so there was going to be a tsunami of people using VPNs to gamble without legalization in Canada.
Provincial governments are way too happy with sin taxes in general, to the point of encouraging the vices they supposedly want to reduce.
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.
This is a bandaid at best though. At some point we need to start having discussions on how to let the self destructive people self remove themselves from society.
Actually, to my surprise, it was nearly every party that tried to get similar legislation passed, and eventually it got nearly unanimous favour, which I find a little sad.
If you pass legislation without due diligence regarding constraining a now legal activity, then it is effectively an act of support for advertising it. In this case, nearly all members of all political parties supported legalizing it, and then passed it off to the provinces and washed their hands of it until now
I was going to upvote this comment but changed my mind because I think although we both see gambling ads as a scourge, we could not be more far apart in our reasons.
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.
>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.
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". 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 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.
Drugs and alcohol, for sure, I can see it. They are a disproportionate drain on the public health apparatus compared to individuals that live a healthy lifestyle. Use of drugs, alcohol, driving motorcycles, eating too much fatty food, participating in dangerous sports, all have a public health components.
I'm not seeing it for gambling. How is that expensive for anyone but the person doing the gambling?
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 was addicted to hard drugs. When in therapy I've met people there for gambling addiction. The takeout lesson was that for some people it is basically the same as stimulants. They had the same issues, fucked up their lives just as much.
I was about to ask the GP why is this a ‘public health crisis’, so appreciative of your preemptive response a little scroll down.
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.
Modern sports gambling ads amount to fraud because winners are prevented from winning more through wager restrictions. The whole industry can only exist because it cheats and lies.
The most damning thing about the online gambling sites/apps is that they don't care about how much you bet, only how much you lose. They aggressively limit and ban their biggest customers if those customers win.
No. They are called "vices" because you get stuck in them. Ten thousand studies on mice tell us that addiction isn't learned morality but innate biology.
We also pass laws regulating murder/arson/theft even though those too can be avoided through self control.
Its pretty remarkable what happened as soon as the regulation was loosened. In Alberta it feels as though these companies bought every single ad spot available. I can’t walk, drive, browse in any direction without seeing a gambling ad somewhere. Its not uncommon for me to see them in two or three places simultaneously. A real boring dystopia.
Likewise in Ontario, almost every ad I see on streaming services is for online gambling sites. We're new parents, and I'm surprised the baby gear companies rolling in money that are surely targeting us can't outspend these sites.
If I watch a hockey game on the regional broadcasters, I'll typically see 2-3 different apps marketed on each commercial break, followed by another handful of gambling-related entities marketed on the dynamic signage boards during the game, followed by another gambling app which sponsors the intermission panels. It's quite brutal.
The gambling business is a license to print money and the biggest obstacle is having users. Every dollar spent on ads to acquire more users will be worth it monetarily.
I'm in Australia and I've never worked for a bookie before, but certainly the ads are all targeted at men, and I remember seeing an app designed specifically for women looking to bet on horses (you entered your star sign, favourite colours etc, shook your phone and it chose some horse numbers).
The big loser in this might be the NHL and the NHLPA(Players association). The NHL salary cap has gone up alot in the past few years and TV is a big driver of that.
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.
The existence of a salary cap is evidence that the players' unions need to advocate harder for their interests. Can you think of a "maximum allowable salary" in any other industry? It's clearly cartel-like behavior by the franchises. The players bring like 95% of the value in professional sports.
NHL brought in the salary cap system following the 2004-05 lockout, because the league wanted to implement salary cap following the expiration of the previous agreement.
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.
Gambling improves viewership. You have people across the world now watching these small market games with a microscope because of some five leg parlay bet they have going on with the goalies stat line.
You also have people sending death threats to players because of their bets. The improved viewership by bettors makes the leagues more profitable, but that's not synonymous with better for everyone involved in the long run.
That's probably been going on for a while. Probably even worse tangible treats to players in the times when the books were more wholly controlled by organized crime with local reach. Makes you wonder about all the times a player is out hurt in the old days before a big game if they maybe got a visit from someone.
Smaller sports have less gambling revenue, but also less revenue overall, and player salaries are lower - so e.g. professional curlers might be proportionally worse off with the lost revenue than NHL players.
Curling is basically the only sport I watch, and I'm on the fence about abandoning it due to gambling ads.
Is it worth the $100+ a month? There may be alternate sources for curling streams where you don't have to pay to be bombarded.
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!
I don't have cable, for their streaming services, Sportsnet is $35/month and TSN is $25/month, with typically non-overlapping months. (Because Sportsnet/TSN broadcast curling events from different organizations, and they need to be non-overlapping for the players' sakes.)
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 I can get stuck behind someone at the pharmacy checkout who is buying lotto tickets boggles my mind every time. Personally I think we need to go way further than this, but it's a start.
people tolerate the lottery because 1) it's run by the state, 2) the money goes into a tax fund that is used to fund improvements on the state level, 3) advertising is limited, and 4) it's limited to fairly straightforward scratchers or lotto-ball picks.
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
People tolerate it because it's been around long enough to be normalized.
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.
I tolerate it more than all other gambling thats allowed in my jurisdiction because it's at least a little bit rate limited (only 3 draws a week), involves a bit more friction (tickets are physical only), and profits is specifically returned to the community via an extensive grant system (isnt just rolled back into general tax revenue).
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.
I've walked out of the store and left my stuff on the counter when I realized the person ahead of me had about 50 tickets to scan. Multiple times. I'm not waiting for 10+ minutes for them to scan all their tickets and then buy $100 more tickets.
It long past time we think hard about what is good for us at the pharmacy, sure there are a handful of life saving drugs, but then the other 95% of the store is pink tax and carcinogens.
OTC medications can be handy, maybe convenience items are okay. It's sure convenient to be able to buy cigarettes and lotto tickets at the same store as your diabetes supplies etc. I guess the contradiction in health/vice items strokes my sense of decency the wrong way. Know your limit, play within it! As the slogan says...
There's a picture at the top of the Wikipedia article for pink tax; depicting men's and women's products for the same price and the woman's version being significantly smaller, you're saying that doesn't exist? I'll go another step and say there's a phenomenon I've noticed where women enforce standards of beauty and cosmetic use, the trope of teenage girls shoplifting cosmetics, socially picking on eachother to enforce a norm the includes the use of various products. And then the marketing for acne products, skin clensers, foundations and fillers and so on and so forth. All targeted at the self esteem of the target audience. This extends into cosmetic surgery botox etc. I find the marketing and the bullying behavior around that industry quite distasteful. My user handle is meant to be an ironic jab at the cosmetic industry after all.
No one is preventing women from buying the products marketed at men if they are happy with the price/feature/branding. That they choose to spend more money than men in this category is not a tax any more than, say, power tools (or any other category with more male spending) being a "blue tax."
no one is banning gambling (impossible with the internet which is why they legalized it..) just advertising on.. tv I guess. because you cant stop advertising on the internet..
They had a ban in place for years and it worked. They have a ban for non kyc cryto markets. It is easy to lean on payment processors and stop 90% of it.
Yeah you just say that customers lost their money illegally, make the companies give the lost money back and watch them implement know-your-customer real quick, all on their own.
Yeah, they had no problem banning online poker that way. Annoying these garbage sports betting sites are allowed now but you still can't play online poker outside of a few states.
Good on CA. The "moral decline" in the US is distressing to say the least. I don't consider myself conservative on many issues, at all, but I never would have guessed that we'd be doing mainstream advertising for prediction markets, having slot machines in all the laundromats and even full-on slots arcades as a stand-alone business (not to mention all the vape shops, chewing tobacco advertisements at the gas pump etc).
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??
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 actually enjoy sports gambling, and since its been legal and the apps hit, I have won more than I've lost over the past what, 3-4 years now. Not a lot more, but enough to where I haven't had to deposit money in a few years. Call it an entertaining hobby, my goal isn't to make real money, just to feel smug about being smarter than the odds-makers.
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.
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.
Roughly 51% of the population of the country, with almost 40% in Ontario. Unfortunately won't do much if you're not restricting it in your biggest market.
i saw a commercial of a presumably 18 year old ignoring their family at dinner and gambling under the table on their phone and the line went something like "they dont need to know how much fun youre having!". this was during a baseball game im watching with kids. its totally fukt
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.
Good riddance. Why did we ever allow this to happen? It's an entirely self-inflicted public health crisis.
There are a number of things that cycle because the solution ends up being successful enough that the next generation doesn't realize there is a problem being solved. Chesterton's Fence, except on a generational timescale it's Chesterton's Oscillating Fence.
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.)
> we don't allow gambling in every convenience store in the country
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.
Lottery tickets at least avoid the worst aspects of the real time feedback that things like slot machines can give. Though scratchoffs certainly get closer.
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....
I can't shake sonething I read in one of Terry Pratchett's books. In it, a character convinces a barbarian horde that it is a bad idea to descend on farmers, kill them all, and take their belongings. It is better to keep them alive, and collect 30% of their belongings each year perpetually. The connection between politics and crime is very close.
Yes, same in the US. States like to lecture us on gambling when they are the biggest operators out there.
States operate gambling so that there is no profit motive in running it. That's the theory for it anyway.
If they actually operated in a disinterested way, sure, but how many different forms of advertising do you see the lotto being promoted in? Doesn't seem disinterested to me.
What? States make buckets of money from gambling. They typically claimed it was "for education" but money is fungible and our other taxes never went down, so anything it offsets in one budget just leaves more money for other budgets.
The real reason they can do it is they (the state) have a monopoly on violence and you don't.
Or that they have a monopoly on lawmaking.
Nobody is going to start a violent revolution over lottery tickets.
Read my second sentence again.
I read your second sentence but I don't get it. Isn't generating profit for the state literally the entire point of the lottery? Who is arguing that it doesn't do that in theory or practice?
Profit motive implies profit maximization behavior or mandates. A state-run lottery should not have that. Again, in theory.
> Our grandchildren will forget again.
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.
Widespread gambling is negative sum.
Ditto, this is a cancer. Wayne Gretzky is dead to me because of his support of these ads. The greatest Canadian athlete of the 80s and 90s is now Bret "The Hitman" Hart.
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.
> Wayne Gretzky is dead to me because of his support of these ads.
This is just the latest in a long line of shit "The Great One" has done to be an embarrassment to Canada.
the sucking up to trump is the biggest. though his wine is probably up there too.
While sports betting was allowed, in the past I don't think it was allowed to be advertised beyond like lottery displays. You would not see ads during Hockey Night in Canada for it either on the boards or during breaks. Now they are all over and run by third parties.
The best there is. The best there was. The best there ever will be.
Too many people don't have knowledge of Bret Hart and this comment being grey shows it.
Lemieux is/was the best that will ever be.
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The guy who sold out in the 80s and moved to LA is now dead to you over gambling ads? Very delayed reaction.
I am from Montreal and (I can't believe this but it is 100% true) I was bullied in my (English-speaking) Montreal-area grade school for wearing non-Oilers merch. I was pleased when he left. (Yes, this is the home of Rocket Richard, the Pocket Rocket, Jean Beliveau, Guy Lafleur and Patrick Roy at the time)
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.
Tangentially related, but I'm curious. How does bilingualism in Montreal work out in practice? I know most of the rest of Quebec is very Francophone, but Montreal is more bilingual.
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.
I'm not the best person to ask, but the last I heard, New Brunswick is the only officially bilingual province. The rest are either French or English only. (It was a news story when the premier of Manitoba spoke in French in his legislature a few weeks back).
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..)
> That said, I live in Alberta now and normal serious parents tend to send their kids to French immersion.
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.
> I think the online element hates Gretzky because of something about the order of Canada
I would say it has a fair bit more to do with his cozying up to Trump
So this was you?
https://www.nfb.ca/film/sweater/
LOL, this is literally my favourite piece of Canadian culture.
Sadly, no pond hockey games with my friends, because I had no friends, because I didn't support the Oilers. ;)
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The ostensible reason provided (at least according to press reports at the time) was to divert people from offshore gambling operations, allowing the government to capture revenue as well as protect consumers. That argument isn't entirely without merit either. The US supreme court legalized sports gambling in 2018, so there was going to be a tsunami of people using VPNs to gamble without legalization in Canada.
The US SCOTUS did not legalize gambling. They said the federal government can allow it, or ban it, but it must treat all states the same.
Provincial governments are way too happy with sin taxes in general, to the point of encouraging the vices they supposedly want to reduce.
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.
This is a bandaid at best though. At some point we need to start having discussions on how to let the self destructive people self remove themselves from society.
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Psst, buddy, your ignorance is showing
Tell me what I'm ignoring if you think I'm wrong. I am curious tho, scientifically speaking, when does life begin?
https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/i-did-not-want-to-die-m...
https://www.foxnews.com/media/family-sounds-alarm-83-year-ol...
https://www.newsweek.com/kiano-vafaeian-canada-assisted-suic...
> scientifically speaking, when does life begin?
Over 3 billion years ago, I think.
Totally agree, but we got here because of the liberals who have a rather simplified view of reality.
Actually, to my surprise, it was nearly every party that tried to get similar legislation passed, and eventually it got nearly unanimous favour, which I find a little sad.
https://www.ourcommons.ca/members/en/votes/43/2/52
Which liberals have been clamouring for gambling ads? Name and shame them!
If you pass legislation without due diligence regarding constraining a now legal activity, then it is effectively an act of support for advertising it. In this case, nearly all members of all political parties supported legalizing it, and then passed it off to the provinces and washed their hands of it until now
https://www.ourcommons.ca/members/en/votes/43/2/52
The ones in power who got this passed
I was going to upvote this comment but changed my mind because I think although we both see gambling ads as a scourge, we could not be more far apart in our reasons.
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.
May you or your loved ones never become afflicted with an addiction, lest you have to reassess your understanding and stance regarding addiction.
>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.
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.
> You have far less agency than you think you do
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". 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 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.
Drugs and alcohol, for sure, I can see it. They are a disproportionate drain on the public health apparatus compared to individuals that live a healthy lifestyle. Use of drugs, alcohol, driving motorcycles, eating too much fatty food, participating in dangerous sports, all have a public health components.
I'm not seeing it for gambling. How is that expensive for anyone but the person doing the gambling?
Gambling easily ruins more lives than just the gambler’s. It can be as effective as drugs or alcohol in that regard.
So can shopping, eating, sex, video games, success, …
How do we choose which pleasurable activities will be forbidden for the benefit of the minority who cannot safely enjoy them?
It's expensive for their families as well.
uhhh, try being the child or family member of a problem gambler. almost as consequential as drugs or alcohol in my experience.
> I could give two shits about the "public health crisis"
How is it that you live in society among others, presumably, yet are able to remain unaffected by the public health?
We used to have freedom and self-control.
You can still gamble.
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'm actually consistent in the other direction.
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")
I was addicted to hard drugs. When in therapy I've met people there for gambling addiction. The takeout lesson was that for some people it is basically the same as stimulants. They had the same issues, fucked up their lives just as much.
So yeah it is on the scale of advertising meth.
I was about to ask the GP why is this a ‘public health crisis’, so appreciative of your preemptive response a little scroll down.
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.
The gambling industry has never shown evidence of self-control.
They seem to be pretty diligent about it, I mean once I hit on 17 and won on 22, but generally they are pretty vigilant about it.
Modern sports gambling ads amount to fraud because winners are prevented from winning more through wager restrictions. The whole industry can only exist because it cheats and lies.
The most damning thing about the online gambling sites/apps is that they don't care about how much you bet, only how much you lose. They aggressively limit and ban their biggest customers if those customers win.
Use polymarket, they don't care.
No. They are called "vices" because you get stuck in them. Ten thousand studies on mice tell us that addiction isn't learned morality but innate biology.
We also pass laws regulating murder/arson/theft even though those too can be avoided through self control.
The studies that showed rats would suck on a morphine feed until they got very sick had a floor which was demonstrated in the 1970s
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park
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We used to be able to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. Being influencable by advertising is a moral failing. </s>
Its pretty remarkable what happened as soon as the regulation was loosened. In Alberta it feels as though these companies bought every single ad spot available. I can’t walk, drive, browse in any direction without seeing a gambling ad somewhere. Its not uncommon for me to see them in two or three places simultaneously. A real boring dystopia.
Likewise in Ontario, almost every ad I see on streaming services is for online gambling sites. We're new parents, and I'm surprised the baby gear companies rolling in money that are surely targeting us can't outspend these sites.
If I watch a hockey game on the regional broadcasters, I'll typically see 2-3 different apps marketed on each commercial break, followed by another handful of gambling-related entities marketed on the dynamic signage boards during the game, followed by another gambling app which sponsors the intermission panels. It's quite brutal.
All true.
Also jersey patch sponsor and a sponsored mention during the pre-game.
The gambling business is a license to print money and the biggest obstacle is having users. Every dollar spent on ads to acquire more users will be worth it monetarily.
I wonder what that did to the girlfriends and wives of the province, can’t be good
Why do you assume they aren't gambling too?
I'm in Australia and I've never worked for a bookie before, but certainly the ads are all targeted at men, and I remember seeing an app designed specifically for women looking to bet on horses (you entered your star sign, favourite colours etc, shook your phone and it chose some horse numbers).
they're not gambling, not like degenerate gamblers
The big loser in this might be the NHL and the NHLPA(Players association). The NHL salary cap has gone up alot in the past few years and TV is a big driver of that.
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.
The existence of a salary cap is evidence that the players' unions need to advocate harder for their interests. Can you think of a "maximum allowable salary" in any other industry? It's clearly cartel-like behavior by the franchises. The players bring like 95% of the value in professional sports.
NHL brought in the salary cap system following the 2004-05 lockout, because the league wanted to implement salary cap following the expiration of the previous agreement.
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.
that sounds like union talk, comrade
I thought people getting what they're worth is capitalism 101.
The wealthy love to claim that we have a meritocracy.
Gambling improves viewership. You have people across the world now watching these small market games with a microscope because of some five leg parlay bet they have going on with the goalies stat line.
You also have people sending death threats to players because of their bets. The improved viewership by bettors makes the leagues more profitable, but that's not synonymous with better for everyone involved in the long run.
That's probably been going on for a while. Probably even worse tangible treats to players in the times when the books were more wholly controlled by organized crime with local reach. Makes you wonder about all the times a player is out hurt in the old days before a big game if they maybe got a visit from someone.
Smaller sports have less gambling revenue, but also less revenue overall, and player salaries are lower - so e.g. professional curlers might be proportionally worse off with the lost revenue than NHL players.
Curling is basically the only sport I watch, and I'm on the fence about abandoning it due to gambling ads.
Is it worth the $100+ a month? There may be alternate sources for curling streams where you don't have to pay to be bombarded.
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!
I don't have cable, for their streaming services, Sportsnet is $35/month and TSN is $25/month, with typically non-overlapping months. (Because Sportsnet/TSN broadcast curling events from different organizations, and they need to be non-overlapping for the players' sakes.)
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 I can get stuck behind someone at the pharmacy checkout who is buying lotto tickets boggles my mind every time. Personally I think we need to go way further than this, but it's a start.
people tolerate the lottery because 1) it's run by the state, 2) the money goes into a tax fund that is used to fund improvements on the state level, 3) advertising is limited, and 4) it's limited to fairly straightforward scratchers or lotto-ball picks.
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
People tolerate it because it's been around long enough to be normalized.
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.
I tolerate it more than all other gambling thats allowed in my jurisdiction because it's at least a little bit rate limited (only 3 draws a week), involves a bit more friction (tickets are physical only), and profits is specifically returned to the community via an extensive grant system (isnt just rolled back into general tax revenue).
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 preys on poor people, yes, but it's neither a tax, nor would it stop preying on them if the ticket prices rose according to income.
I've walked out of the store and left my stuff on the counter when I realized the person ahead of me had about 50 tickets to scan. Multiple times. I'm not waiting for 10+ minutes for them to scan all their tickets and then buy $100 more tickets.
I've seen some places (US) that have scanners separate from the checkout. That way the lotto nuts can scan without holding up the line.
A lot of them don't use those scanners ... they get the clerk to scan all their tickets instead.
It long past time we think hard about what is good for us at the pharmacy, sure there are a handful of life saving drugs, but then the other 95% of the store is pink tax and carcinogens.
Are you suggesting that pharmacies should only fill prescriptions and not sell any OTC medications, cosmetics, or other convenience products?
OTC medications can be handy, maybe convenience items are okay. It's sure convenient to be able to buy cigarettes and lotto tickets at the same store as your diabetes supplies etc. I guess the contradiction in health/vice items strokes my sense of decency the wrong way. Know your limit, play within it! As the slogan says...
Couldn't agree with you more. Why is there so much candy at the checkout of... the pharmacy????
"Pink tax" isn't real.
There's a picture at the top of the Wikipedia article for pink tax; depicting men's and women's products for the same price and the woman's version being significantly smaller, you're saying that doesn't exist? I'll go another step and say there's a phenomenon I've noticed where women enforce standards of beauty and cosmetic use, the trope of teenage girls shoplifting cosmetics, socially picking on eachother to enforce a norm the includes the use of various products. And then the marketing for acne products, skin clensers, foundations and fillers and so on and so forth. All targeted at the self esteem of the target audience. This extends into cosmetic surgery botox etc. I find the marketing and the bullying behavior around that industry quite distasteful. My user handle is meant to be an ironic jab at the cosmetic industry after all.
No one is preventing women from buying the products marketed at men if they are happy with the price/feature/branding. That they choose to spend more money than men in this category is not a tax any more than, say, power tools (or any other category with more male spending) being a "blue tax."
About time.
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.
Hopefully they ban the neo betting prediction markets as well
Prediction markets are already heavily regulated in Canada.
the sportsbooks/prediction markets were just legalized this summer. that's why there was a swell of advertisement.
it seems unlikely they'd ban something so soon after legalizing.
no one is banning gambling (impossible with the internet which is why they legalized it..) just advertising on.. tv I guess. because you cant stop advertising on the internet..
I see lots of gambling ads online but I don't see a lot of ads for cigarettes. Apparently there are some levers that can be pulled.
I don’t get it can you rent a server and make a cigarette company in an afternoon?
By bulking buying off reserves, yes
Absolutely. I can hand-roll and deliver them. You want some? /s
They had a ban in place for years and it worked. They have a ban for non kyc cryto markets. It is easy to lean on payment processors and stop 90% of it.
Yeah you just say that customers lost their money illegally, make the companies give the lost money back and watch them implement know-your-customer real quick, all on their own.
Yeah, they had no problem banning online poker that way. Annoying these garbage sports betting sites are allowed now but you still can't play online poker outside of a few states.
This is not an accurate history of online poker.
This is not a useful reply.
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Nothing normal about gambling.
I think it's mutually beneficial, you're not somewhere you don't like.
ooh boy, one would think right? Its def beneficial for me, but many Canadians don't like it.
Good on CA. The "moral decline" in the US is distressing to say the least. I don't consider myself conservative on many issues, at all, but I never would have guessed that we'd be doing mainstream advertising for prediction markets, having slot machines in all the laundromats and even full-on slots arcades as a stand-alone business (not to mention all the vape shops, chewing tobacco advertisements at the gas pump etc).
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??
they need to be banned in the U.S as well.
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 actually enjoy sports gambling, and since its been legal and the apps hit, I have won more than I've lost over the past what, 3-4 years now. Not a lot more, but enough to where I haven't had to deposit money in a few years. Call it an entertaining hobby, my goal isn't to make real money, just to feel smug about being smarter than the odds-makers.
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.
We banned smoking ads, gambling should be no different.
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"curb" not "ban". Boo.
It will be interesting to see where this lands.
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...
nobody making enough money with a job, but there's a new way to tax them
Gambling is not a job.
I watch Blue Jays games sometimes. The gambling ads are even more pervasive than in US teams’ games. It really damages the viewing experience.
"Ontario & Alberta Oppose The Federal Bill"
Quelle surprise.
Roughly 51% of the population of the country, with almost 40% in Ontario. Unfortunately won't do much if you're not restricting it in your biggest market.
The addiction with by far, with the highest likelihood subject committing suicide is gambling addiction.
i saw a commercial of a presumably 18 year old ignoring their family at dinner and gambling under the table on their phone and the line went something like "they dont need to know how much fun youre having!". this was during a baseball game im watching with kids. its totally fukt
Good teachable moment for you and your kids?
about damn time, they're out of control
Libertarians will cry "freedom of speech".
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.
Now we need to do that down here in the States.
Hell, making it a requirement that you be at a casino is probably another thing that should be looked into.