How Big Is Canada’s Black Market for Sports Betting?
Date
2024-09
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Cardus Work and Economics
Abstract
[A Cardus Research Brief] One of the arguments made when single-event sports betting was legalized in Canada in 2021 was that people were going to bet on sports anyway, so why not make it safer to do so, and taxable? There’s an element of truth to this. Regulation does allow for government oversight and improved play protections, and it’s better for gambling revenue to go to problem-gambling treatment and other government programs than to organized crime. Yet there are several problems with the argument. For one, it presents gambling demand as basically inelastic: people have a certain amount they want to bet on sports, and that’s the amount they’re going to bet, regardless of the legal conditions for doing so. But gambling corporations (including government-owned corporations such as OLG) clearly don’t believe demand for their product is inelastic, given that they spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year trying to stoke demand through advertising.