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More than 80 per cent of Ontario teens surveyed said they had seen or heard an online gambling ad in the past month, and roughly a quarter of students reported encountering them on a daily basis.Giordano Ciampini/The Canadian Press
Online gambling has “significantly increased” among Ontario teenagers, with one in eight students gambling online during the last school year and one in 10 betting on sports, according to a report released on Monday.
These findings are from the latest Ontario Student Drug Use and Health Survey, published by Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. The survey included more than 11,000 students enrolled in Grades 7 to 12 across the province.
Compared with the last survey two years ago, the share of students who reported gambling online grew to 12 per cent from 8 per cent – a 50-per-cent jump. Across Ontario, one in five students are now engaging in some form of gambling, either online or off.
For the first time, the survey also asked students about their exposure to online gambling advertisements. More than 80 per cent said they had seen or heard an online gambling ad in the past month, and roughly a quarter of students reported encountering them on a daily basis.
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“I just look at the numbers, and I think, ‘Oh boy. There is an issue,’” said principal investigator Hayley Hamilton, a senior scientist with CAMH and co-director of the Institute for Mental Health Policy Research.
“Increased accessibility, and the fact that gambling is online – it’s opened up to young people more than in the past.”
The CAMH survey is Canada’s longest-running school survey, administered every two years to identify trends in health and substance use among students.
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Dr. Hayley Hamilton, Co-Director and Senior Scientist at the Institute for Mental Health Policy Research at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), expressed concerns about the spike in online gambling among Ontario teenagers.EDUARDO LIMA/The Globe and Mail
The survey first started monitoring online gambling in 2003, and researchers added questions about internet-based sports betting in 2017.
Since then, the online gambling landscape in Ontario has changed dramatically. In 2021, the federal government legalized single-event sports betting, and one year later, Ontario became the first Canadian province to open its online gambling market to private operators.
Today, Ontario is considered North America’s most competitive online gambling market. There are currently 48 operators in Ontario running 83 websites that offer online casinos and sports-betting platforms, according to iGaming Ontario, the Crown agency that manages the private market for online gambling.
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In the 2024-25 fiscal year, these sites had 2.6 million active accounts, collectively wagering more than $82-billion. But emerging public-health data is painting a worrying picture about the hidden fallout from this explosion of gambling activity.
Last year, the Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction released a study based on 2024 survey results, finding that 69.4 per cent of young adults aged 18 to 29 who gambled online met the criteria for problem gambling. Roughly a quarter experienced a high level of gambling-related harms, such as accumulating credit-card debt or hurting their personal relationships.
Another recent research paper published by the Canadian Medical Association Journal reported alarming increases in gambling-related helpline calls since Ontario legalized online gambling, almost exclusively among boys and young men; among the 15 to 24 age group, helpline contacts surged 317 per cent.
At CAMH’s outpatient clinic for problem gambling, psychotherapist Megha Vatsya has noticed an uptick in younger clients over the past five years, especially men in their 20s and 30s.
But in the past year or so, she’s started getting referrals for teenagers, including one as young as 15 – something that never used to happen when she joined the clinic in 2019.
“The biggest thing I’m hearing is either poker or sports betting,” she said. “A lot of times we’ll hear things like, ‘All my friends are doing it, I don’t want to miss out.’”
Ms. Vatsya isn’t sure which apps or websites young people are using specifically.
While her clientele is predominantly male, the new student survey suggests that girls are increasingly getting involved with gambling. Six per cent of female students reported gambling online during the previous 12 months – double the percentage from the last survey.
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Another subgroup with a significant increase was eighth graders; last year, 10 per cent said they gambled online, up from 4.6 per cent in 2023.
Other worrying trends from the survey relate to video gaming, with one in 10 students reporting that they played for five or more hours a day. Seventeen per cent of students had symptoms of video-gaming problems, such as disruption to their family or schooling – significantly up from 2007, when only 9 per cent reported the same.
A quarter of students also said they spent five or more hours a day on social media. This is more than double what it was in 2013, the first year that the survey started tracking this measure.
There are also some significant bright spots in the latest survey results, CAMH’s Dr. Hamilton noted.
The last survey released in 2023 – which was conducted at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic – showed dramatic increases in students reporting poor mental health and psychological distress.
But two years later, many mental-health measures have improved, Dr. Hamilton said. For example, students experiencing moderate to serious psychological distress declined to 46 per cent from 51 per cent, and those who reported self-harming dropped to 15 per cent from 19 per cent.
Many of these measures were added to the survey in 2013, and this is the first time that Dr. Hamilton has seen year-over-year improvements.
She said this could suggest that school-based interventions and other resources aimed at improving student mental health are having an impact.
It also shows that students are faring much better now compared with the darkest days of the pandemic, when schools were shuttered and many students struggled with their mental health.
“We’ve been waiting to see if things are going to go back to prepandemic levels,” she said. “The numbers are still a concern, but I just take the little wins where I can.”