Problematic online gambling

The legalization of single-event sports betting in Canada in August 2021 and Ontario’s iGaming market launch in 2022 materially increased the availability of online gambling products for young Canadians. Recognizing that some youth engage in gambling illegally before they are of age, this section uses a two-tier structure to properly scope harms to the children and youth aged 12 to 24 population straddling both sides of the age of eligibility for these platforms.

Tier 1: Under 18

Platforms are legally prohibited from serving minors, but enforcement is largely absent. Using data from the 2025 Ontario Student Drug Use and Health Survey, Boak and Hamilton (2026) report that about 12 percent of students from grades 7 to 12 gambled online in the past year, up from 8 percent in 2023, while about one in six students shows symptoms of a video gaming problem.1 Past research has found that about 17.4 percent of adolescent online gamblers score at high severity on the Canadian Adolescent Gambling Inventory (CAGI).2 Applying these participation and severity rates to the population aged 12 to 17, together with a conservative international benchmark for clinically significant gaming disorder, this would suggest that about 34,000 to 79,000 children and youth are affected by problem gambling and a further 54,000 to 81,000 by gaming disorder — some 87,000 to 160,000 cases in all.3

We estimate treatment costs range from $12 million to $28 million annually, applying a per-episode treatment cost of $3,500 — consistent with publicly-funded outpatient gambling treatment in Ontario across 8 to 15 counselling sessions, the modal pathway for adolescent help-seekers — across the affected problem gambling population and assuming a 10 percent treatment-seeking rate.3 No treatment cost is applied to gaming disorder, where no comparable Canadian data exist.

Beyond direct treatment costs, problem gambling and gaming disorder impose welfare losses on affected youth that extend well beyond the year of treatment. Applying the same QALY framework used elsewhere in this analysis (CDA threshold of $50,000 per QALY), a conservative QALY decrement of 0.05 to 0.10 per affected youth-year for problem gambling — consistent with EQ-5D utility weights for moderate gambling disorder and Australian quality-of-life research finding gambling-related decrements comparable to those for alcohol use disorder — and a lower 0.03 to 0.08 for gaming disorder, yields additional welfare losses of approximately $164 million to $717 million annually. Combined, the Tier 1 cost burden of problem gambling and gaming disorder among Canadian children and youth is estimated at approximately $176 million to $745 million annually.

Tier 2: Ages 18–24

Research completed for the Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction,4 drawing on a national survey of 8,211 Canadians conducted in late 2024, found that 32 percent of young adults aged 18–29 reported gambling online. Among those who gambled online, 23.5 percent experienced high levels of gambling-related harms — the highest harm threshold reported in the study.

Applying this participation rate to the 3.6 million Canadians aged 18–24 yields an estimated 271,000 online problem gamblers in the high scenario (32 percent participation × 23.5 percent high harms rate). A lower bound scenario applies a 15 percent problem rate based on a 2018 Mental Health Research Canada (MHRC) poll5 of Canadians aged 18–24, yielding an estimated 173,000 problem gamblers, noting that this figure reflects a broader threshold of problematic gambling behaviour and should be treated as a conservative floor.

We then model financial losses of $2,000–$3,500 per person, addictions treatment (10 percent seek-out rate, at a cost of $3,500), and family and social costs of approximately $1,000 to $1,750 per problem gambler — scaled proportionally to the estimated financial loss per gambler (estimated family and social costs at approximately 50 percent of the gambler's own direct financial loss). This yields costs of between $580 million and $1.5 billion annually. Applying the same QALY framework as in Tier 1 (a QALY decrement of 0.05 to 0.10 per affected young adult-year, valued at the CDA threshold of $50,000 per QALY) generates additional welfare losses of approximately $435 million to $1.4 billion annually. Combined, economic losses and costs across this sub-category total approximately $1.0 billion to $2.9 billion annually.

Combined between tiers 1 and 2 we estimate total economic costs to be between $1.2 billion and $3.6 billion annually, the largest of the six harm categories.