Gambling addiction statistics Canada: what the data shows

✓ Trusted Sources ✓ How Do We Rate?

This content contains affiliate links — if you sign up through them, we may earn a commission. This does not affect our reviews. How we make money

What does it mean when a headline says emergency room visits for gambling “nearly doubled”? Two Ontario studies published in 2026 link the opening of the province's online market in April 2022 to nearly twice as many emergency visits for gambling disorder and to more calls to ConnexOntario, with the increase concentrated among boys and men. The cases are rare and severe. The latest national survey is from 2018.

Searching for gambling addiction statistics Canada-wide turns up four sources that measure different things: hospital records, ConnexOntario contacts, a 2018 federal survey and a 2024 online panel. This guide sets them side by side with their methods and says what none of them measures.

If gambling is affecting you or someone you care about, these services can help:

Ontario: ConnexOntario, 1-866-531-2600, free and confidential. You can also text CONNEX to 247247.
Alberta: Addiction Helpline, 1-866-332-2322.
Other provinces and territories: gambling helplines for every province and territory.
In immediate danger, call 9-1-1. If you are thinking about suicide, call or text 9-8-8.

What the emergency department study found

The first study comes from researchers at ICES and was published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine in its September 2026 issue. Daniel Myran is its senior author, and ICES issued a news release on September 16, 2026.

The researchers analyzed emergency department visits among Ontarians aged 10 to 105 over a 14-year study period. They compared the visits seen before and after April 2022, when Ontario's private online market opened, with the number that would have been expected.

A visit was counted when gambling disorder was recorded as either the main or a contributing reason. Over the study period, that came to 952 visits by 757 people. Almost three-quarters of them were male.

The ICES headline says the visits “nearly doubled.” That is a comparison with an expected number, not a simple count.

The rise was not spread evenly. By the end of the study period, visits among males aged 10 to 29 ran 154% above expectation, and among males aged 30 to 44, 116% above. Among females, there were no changes.

More than 70% of the visits involved another mental health condition or heavy substance use, and almost one-third led to a hospital admission.

How big is “nearly doubled” in real numbers?

Small in absolute terms. Over the 14-year study period, 757 people had 952 emergency visits in which gambling disorder was recorded, among all Ontarians aged 10 to 105. That describes the most severe cases, not everyone who has gambling problems.

The headline is true only with the sentence it leaves out. “Doubled” needs the absolute scale beside it. The visits are rare, and they are the cases serious enough to end in an emergency department.

Two things changed in the period. A federal change allowing betting on a single sporting event took effect in August 2021, and the private online market opened in April 2022. The study treats the two changes together. A comparison with expected numbers shows that two things happened together, and it does not show why.

Myran, quoted in the ICES release, adds a caution. “Most people experiencing gambling problems will never seek care,” so the rise in visits may be revealing a much larger rise in gambling-related harm. The data can neither confirm nor rule that out.

What do calls to ConnexOntario show?

They rose too. A second study from the same research group, in the Canadian Medical Association Journal in March 2026, found that monthly gambling-related contacts per million people aged 15 and older averaged 13.4 before the provincial site PlayOLG launched in January 2015, 17.0 after it and 26.2 after the private market opened in April 2022.

The data cover January 2012 to September 2025. Of 745,716 contacts to ConnexOntario in that time, 37,087, or 5.0%, were about gambling. The authors found that increases occurred almost exclusively in adolescent boys and men aged 15 to 44, and they read this as suggesting “increased gambling problems, care-seeking, or both.”

The model also estimates about 20.8 additional monthly contacts per million people in September 2025, compared with a scenario with neither PlayOLG nor the private market, with a 95% confidence interval of 8.5 to 33.2. The authors express the gap as an increase of about 198.3%, an estimate against a modelled scenario and not an observed count.

Each indicator has a weakness. ICES says the rise in contacts could have been explained by greater promotion of support services, including requirements for gambling advertisements and websites to display ConnexOntario's contact details. More calls can mean more awareness as well as more harm. Emergency visits are not prompted by an advertisement, so that measure does not share the weakness. It has its own, because it catches only people who were sick enough to go. Two imperfect measures pointing the same way are informative. They are not proof.

Gambling addiction statistics in Canada: two surveys, two methods

Two surveys give a share of the population, and the shares do not agree. Their methods differ too much for the gap to show a change over time.

Statistics Canada, 2018

The last national probability survey is the 2018 Canadian Community Health Survey Gambling Rapid Response, analyzed by Statistics Canada in an article released on August 9, 2022. Interviews ran from July 3 to December 24, 2018, by telephone and in person, with 24,983 respondents aged 15 and older in the 10 provinces. The territories were not included.

Of Canadians aged 15 or older, 64.5% reported gambling in the past year. Of past-year gamblers, 1.6%, or 304,400 people, were at moderate-to-severe risk of gambling problems, defined as a score of 3 or higher on the Canadian Problem Gambling Index. Statistics Canada reports a higher percentage of men (2.0%) than of women (1.2%) at that level of risk.

The survey is from 2018. It predates the pandemic and Ontario's online market, and its authors call the results an important baseline.

Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction panel, 2024

The second source is Online Gambling Among Young Canadian Adults: A Call to Action, published in November 2025 by the Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction (CCSA), Greo Evidence Insights and Mental Health Research Canada. Its data come from an online panel run by Pollara through Léger, collected from October 24 to November 12, 2024. Of 8,211 adults who took part, including an extra sample from British Columbia, 7,960 were analyzed, weighted by age, gender and province. The authors describe participation as self-selecting.

In that sample, 20.1% reported gambling online in the past year, and so did 32.0% of adults aged 18 to 29. On the Problem Gambling Severity Index, 9.9% of the whole sample scored 8 or higher. Among people who gambled online, 40.8% scored 8 or higher, against 0.9% of people who gambled only on lotteries.

The report is open about its limits. Panel samples include people who spend more time online, and the authors note that other researchers have linked such samples to higher rates of problem gambling. They add that this does not affect comparisons between types of gambling. Those comparisons within the sample, such as online against lottery only, are the part that holds up, and even they show an association, not a cause.

The report itself sets 9.9% beside 0.6% from a 2018 national study and calls it more than 15 times greater. It cautions that a sample not drawn from an online panel might give a lower rate, and notes that the 2018 study used a threshold of 5 or higher.

The differences are easiest to see side by side.

Question	Statistics Canada	CCSA panel	ICES, emergency	ICES, ConnexOntario
Where	10 provinces	Canada	Ontario	Ontario
When	July to December 2018	October to November 2024	14-year study period	January 2012 to September 2025
How	Probability sample, phone and in person	Online panel, self-selected	Health records	ConnexOntario records
Who	Aged 15+	Aged 18+	Aged 10 to 105	Aged 15+
Measures	Risk by questionnaire (3+)	Problem gambling by questionnaire (8+)	Emergency visits with a diagnosis	Contacts about gambling
Result	1.6% of past-year gamblers	9.9% of whole sample	952 visits, nearly doubled	13.4 to 26.2 per million a month
Cannot show	Anything after 2018	The rate in the population	People who never seek care	More harm or more calling

Four things differ at once: how people were chosen, the group the percentage is taken from, the score that counts as a problem and the age range. Together they rule out drawing a trend. A headline that rounds 9.9% to “one in ten” drops the words “of an online panel.”

How much is wagered in Ontario's regulated market?

The turnover is large. The monthly figures from iGaming Ontario (iGO) add up to $103.3 billion in cash wagers in fiscal 2025–2026. Wagers are turnover, not losses, because the same dollar can be bet many times. What remains after winnings are paid out is gaming revenue, which was $4.27 billion. Neither number measures harm.

Fiscal year	Cash wagers	Gaming revenue	Active accounts, monthly average
2022–2023	$35.5 billion	$1.41 billion	474,000
2023–2024	$63.3 billion	$2.44 billion	723,000
2024–2025	$82.7 billion	$3.22 billion	937,000
2025–2026	$103.3 billion	$4.27 billion	1.17 million

Fiscal years run from April to March, and the first starts when the private market opened in April 2022. Each row adds up iGO's monthly figures, and averages the account counts, from its August 2026 data tables, published on September 23, 2026.

The tables carry caveats. The numbers are unaudited and subject to adjustment, cash wagers exclude promotional wagers such as bonuses, and the data do not include the igaming offering of the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation (OLG) or pari-mutuel wagering on horse racing. Accounts are not people either, because one person may hold accounts with several operators.

In August 2026, casino games made up 90% of cash wagers, sports betting 9% and peer-to-peer poker 1%. The abstracts of the ICES studies do not separate results by type of gambling, so that split cannot say which form is linked to harm. A growing market is a measure of exposure, not proof of harm.

One correction for readers who check figures: the $82.7 billion that the ICES news release gives for 2024 matches fiscal 2024–2025 in iGO's tables, while calendar 2024 adds up to $77.6 billion.

What the 91% figure does and does not tell you

On May 21, 2026, the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario (AGCO) published an Ipsos study commissioned by the AGCO and iGaming Ontario. Among Ontarians who had gambled online in the previous three months, 91.1% had played on regulated sites, up from 83.7% a year earlier. Another 8.9% played only on unregulated sites, down from 16.3%. Ipsos surveyed 2,012 residents aged 19 and older between March 30 and April 20, 2026, with a margin of error of 2.2 percentage points for the full sample, 19 times out of 20.

The figure is a share of respondents, not of money or time spent. The AGCO and iGO pages do not say whether the 91.1% includes people who also play on unregulated sites. What “regulated” means is explained in how regulated online gambling works in Canada.

Channelization, the share of players using regulated sites, is not a measure of harm. The ICES abstracts do not say where a person played, and none of the sources read for this guide divides harm by regulated and unregulated sites.

What nobody is measuring yet

Ask three questions of every figure above: which province, which year, which people. On that test, several things have no current figure at all.

A current national rate from a probability sample. The latest is Statistics Canada's from 2018. According to the CCSA report of November 2025, a national study by the Alberta Gambling Research Institute was in progress, and its status could not be confirmed on October 6, 2026.
Alberta. The regulated market opened on July 13, 2026, and the sources read contain no harm data from it yet.
Other provinces. The ICES studies cover Ontario only and are not a result for Canada.
Harm by type of site or type of game. None of the sources read splits it.
People who never seek care. According to ICES, most do not, so hospitals and support services see only the people who do.

On July 2, 2024, the CCSA and Greo called for a pan-Canadian strategy to address gambling-related harms, including monitoring of systematic changes in those harms.

What the numbers mean for one person

Statistics Canada puts the first half plainly: “The majority of people who gamble do so without harm, but a minority will be adversely affected.” The Ontario studies describe the second half, in which the most severe cases rose after April 2022 among boys and men. Neither statement cancels the other.

A statistic describes a group, not a person, and this guide is not a test. To compare your own gambling with national guidelines, see Canada's Lower-Risk Gambling Guidelines: how much is too much. The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) says free treatment, including counselling, is available to anyone in Ontario affected by gambling. This guide gives general information and is not medical or legal advice.

Where to get help with gambling in Ontario and Alberta

Statistics describe groups of people, and you do not need to be sure that gambling is a problem before you ask for help.

Ontario: ConnexOntario, 1-866-531-2600. The service is free and confidential. You can also text CONNEX to 247247, or use live chat or email through its website.
Alberta: Addiction Helpline, 1-866-332-2322.
Every other province and territory: services listed by province and territory.
If you are in immediate danger, call 9-1-1. If you are thinking about suicide, call or text 9-8-8.

Questions people ask about the data

Did emergency room visits for gambling really double in Ontario?

Nearly. ICES's headline says the visits “nearly doubled.” By the end of the study period, visits were 154% above expectation among males aged 10 to 29 and 116% above among males aged 30 to 44, with no changes in females. The study counted 952 visits over 14 years and describes an association, not a cause.

How many people in Canada have a gambling problem?

The latest figure from a probability sample is from 2018, when Statistics Canada found that 1.6% of past-year gamblers, or 304,400 people, were at moderate-to-severe risk. A 2024 online panel found that 9.9% of its sample scored 8 or higher on a different scale. The two cannot be compared.

Why do Statistics Canada and the CCSA report such different numbers?

Four things differ. Statistics Canada used a probability sample of people aged 15 and older, a score of 3 or higher and past-year gamblers as the base. The CCSA used a self-selected online panel of adults aged 18 and older, a score of 8 or higher and the whole sample.

Does the ICES study prove that online gambling caused the increase?

No. A comparison with expected numbers shows that emergency visits rose after the market expanded in April 2022, which is an association, not a cause. Single-event sports betting and the private online market arrived within eight months of each other, and the study treats them together.

Are there gambling addiction statistics Canada-wide that are newer than 2018?

Not from a probability sample, in the sources read on October 6, 2026. The CCSA report of November 2025 is newer but uses an online panel, and its authors say a national study by the Alberta Gambling Research Institute was in progress. Until that study reports, the 2018 survey remains the latest of its kind.

Sources

Pages read and figures checked against each source on October 6, 2026.