iGaming Daily

00:00
Hello and welcome back to iGaming Daily from Toronto. I'm Jessica Wellman, Managing Editor of SBC Media and I am in Toronto for day two of the Canadian Gaming Summit or as you guys might know, SBC Summit Canada. New name, same great vibe. I chaired a room yesterday where every panel I'm just like.

00:25
You Canadians love your content and I love you for it. I am joined by Tom Nightingale, editor, I will call you editor of Canadian Gaming Business Magazine and website at this point in time. Tom, rather than go through what we've been doing at this event, let's just get down to the nitty gritty and start. You kind of had the headlines. What's the quick overview of like the big stories from panels today and yesterday? Yeah, I mean, I will say we heard from the second year in a row, we heard from Alberta Minister Dale Nally.

00:54
This time I will say the news was a bit more that there is no news. Hard to top, we're gonna do it, which was last. Well, exactly. But I mean, he did say, you we've had the timeline pushed back a few times. It now sounds like early 2026, whether we think that means Q1 or H1, I guess we'll find out. But the more interesting line really was that when he comes back with other ministers in cabinet in the fall, that's when they will hash out all this stuff we're...

01:21
hearing questions on what's the tax rate going to look like, what are the advertising standards going to look like. There's definitely a commitment on the Alberta side to getting the governance piece right and getting these regulations in place before they jump two feet first into the market, which a lot of people seem to think is the right way to go about it. Yeah. So I guess it's a, you know, sit tight, wait and see and circle back in the fall. More ministerial news on the Ontario front just this morning.

01:48
We did, yeah, we heard from Stan Cho, who is the Minister of Ontario, basically sort of overhauling the way that they run gaming and oversee gaming. We know that iGaming Ontario is now a separate standalone agency from the AGCO, which is the market regulator. iGo is the conductor manage agency. It sounds like they are now going to work more closely with OLG, which are who are obviously like the lottery corporation previously were the monopolist, I guess, in online gaming.

02:16
now compete with 50 odd commercial operators. Yeah, and Stan Cho, the minister, they're gonna conduct what he described, I think, as like a sweeping review of Ontario gaming, both online and LAN based, because I think the feeling is there's a little bit of a gap between the two. I get the impression the LAN base feels a little left out. I think so, yeah. There's been a thing we've heard about Alberta as well, is there have been some very pointed comments. Make sure that you bring the LAN base guys in from day one, where I feel like is maybe looking back on

02:46
what happened in Ontario at the start, thinking maybe those conversations could have been a bit closer. So it's very clear that from Stan Cho and from Heidi Reinhart was on the panel from IH2's chair of IGO, that they're aware that Ontario gambling is making the kind of money that was in people's wildest dreams, to be honest. I think it's surpassed all expectations. It's now, how do we kick on three years in?

03:12
How do we really make sure that we've got safe play, we're making revenue generation and that everybody is getting their sort of piece of the pie, I think. So on that note, kind of next up, I want each of us to, you go to panels and they're great, but you also chit chat with people and you kind of hear the same questions over and over again. For me, the topic that I kept hearing from people and we've written, you've written quite a bit about it on CGP, is this FinTrac issue. For those who don't understand, it's like the fiscal oversight.

03:42
AML kind of body for not just casinos, like banking institutions, et cetera, et cetera. They had been hacked. The industry couldn't even report to them for several months. It's just been... was like a full year, I think. It's been a bit of a disaster. so Amanda Brewer moderated a panel about it and she was saying it was just even hard to get people to criticize Vintrac because you never want to criticize a regulator, but...

04:11
It sounds based on what she and Dara Graham from Connectify were saying, this stuff, their operators are being fined by an agency that's like, I can't even tell you what I'm doing and you're going to find me. And so I think, I hope with all this reorganization, that's something that does kind of get addressed. Unfortunately, it's a bit external to the gaming vertical itself, but that is one it's hard to talk about because not a lot of this information is public. And as I've said, not a lot of people want to talk about it, but

04:42
fellow Canadians, you are not alone. sounds like everybody is really frustrated by the situation. Yeah, mean, candidly, like conversations that I have around FinTrack, whenever the topic gets brought up, I get a wince from the person that I'm talking to. I'm not sure that FinTrack is anybody's favorite system of doing things. it's because they want to do AML well, you know, to be clear before FinTrack sends somebody to Tom's house to hunt him down. It's that they want to be compliant and it's difficult.

05:12
It is, I think it's just difficult. And now we know that I go working on their own kind of system for gaming operators to report, to streamline the process. Cause part of the issue I think that we've heard is that there's just so much time and effort and work involved, I think in filing these like, just transaction reports and that sort of stuff. And you know, it's growing pains in the market. It's not, it's not really anybody's fault. That's the system that we've been dealt. But it's one of these things that I think need to be worked, need to work around.

05:41
All right, for you, what was the hot topic of conversation? I mean, it's hard to honestly, for me, it's hard to look past the channelization conversation. mean, for channelization is a term that we hear used a lot in Canada. And it's basically like the percentage of players who are playing on regulated operators rather than the black market or the gray market or the unregulated market or whatever you want to call it. hear there's very little

06:08
Until recently, at least, there's been very little kind of conclusive data around where each province stands. We hear a lot from Ontario, as we rightly should, because it's really quite impressive that they hit 85 percent, I think, channelization really quickly. They're closing in on 90 percent. To chime in real quickly, for those who don't know, where are you getting these numbers from? Yeah, so recently there are Ipsos and the Canadian Gaming Association, Ipsos a market research firm.

06:36
They had been working on a study that looked at like the last three months, think, it's surveys of regular gamblers and where they play. And then there was a panel yesterday with Troy Ross from TRN Public Affairs, from Ariane Gaultier from the Quebec Online Gaming Coalition. And they also have been working on their own report in recent months. And the Ontario numbers are...

07:04
certainly substantiated that it's around about 85%, I think. We've also heard some lottery corporations in other provinces give their own numbers, like Play Alberta, for example, last year, last spring, I think, said that they claimed to have about 45 % of the market. The two reports that have come out recently pegs it at, I will say significantly lower than that. So I think the reason the conversation is so interesting is because we know how

07:32
We know that Ontario has had great success in that. Alberta obviously opening up whenever it is Q1 2026. We know that there are conversations going on in other provinces about the potential of looking at a regulated market in the future. And one of the core goals of market regulation, as repeatedly stated, is to bring gambling activity out of the shadows and into the light. So getting a bit of a fuller picture of what's actually going on right now is an important step on the way, I think.

08:01
Yeah, and I will say one of my kind of industry pet peeves, at least on the US side, I have told Tom and Justin Byers before these research numbers where they just kind of pull a giant number out of the air of how big the black market is. It's always very difficult to speculate and research an unregulated vertical where there's no reporting and you're really just trying to gauge. But I think what you're pointing out, and I agree,

08:32
All of these are giving some number that is, I mean, there's a range, there's some that are wildly lower, wildly higher than others, but none of the numbers are great. So I think that this is the example where I will say, I am going to concede that this research is probably pretty accurate and not be the naysayer that yeah, it does seem like it's. Yeah. And you also, the more you know, I got some good data from H2 gambling.

09:01
Capital, who are another Meket Research firm. And again, like not necessarily the exact same percentages, but very much in the same ballpark. And so once you start getting it from multiple sources and it's all kind of there or thereabouts, you're like, okay, well, the picture is becoming a little bit clearer now. All right. So you can read that Ipsos research on Canadian gaming business. We will after the summit wraps, I think we're going to have all sorts of panel write-ups in the coming weeks and months on Canadiangamingbusiness.com.

09:29
The Canadian Gaming Business Magazine is available online and I think Tom is one who will always throw those features on CGP as well. In the meantime, I'm going to do a quick personal plug because it took up God knows how many hours of my life. If you want the rundown on Cal-She and all those amicus briefs, I basically wrote the idiot's guide to it. So check that out, check out Tom's stuff on CGP and we will check back in with you when we get back from the North next week.