Ontario is one of the more interesting online gambling markets in North America. As Canada’s most popular province, online casinos were serving players here for years via the grey area offshore market. That changed in 2022 with the launch of a regulated and licensed online gambling open to international operators. It is the only Canadian province to have such an open system, allowing multiple operators to launch competing casinos.
Today the sector has around 50 licensed casino operators with sites open to the Ontario public, and total wagers are go into tens of billions of dollars annually. It is also – for now – one of the few gambling markets in the world where online casinos are way ahead of land-based gambling venues and sports betting in yearly revenues. So how did this market evolve, and where might it go from here?
Online casinos first emerged globally in the late 1990s. They market began to expand considerably in the early 2000s, as more households and businesses adopted the internet around the world.
The explosive growth of online casinos caught many countries without any kind of blanket gambling laws off guard. In Canada, the Criminal Code permitted provinces to manage their own gambling laws. This meant if a province had no laws against players online gambling, casinos were free to offer services to its residents. In Ontario, this just meant not being based in the province – so offshore online casinos operated in the grey area market for many years.
In 2015 the Ontario Liquor and Gaming Corporation (OLG) launched it’s own online casino games platform PlayOLG. But by 2020 it was clear that Ontario’s players continued to prefer offshore sites. During this time political opinion on offshore sites, which may be regulated elsewhere but not in Canada and pay no local taxes, slowly began to change.
When the pandemic lockdowns and business closures of 2020 forced many countries to look at bolstering their coffers in different ways, the large amounts of Ontarian gambling spend flowing out of the province attracted attention once more. So, the provincial government expedited its existing plans to create a locally regulated, licensed and taxable market.
The story from here unfolded over several years. These were the key events:
2019: The provincial government of Ontario and Premier Doug Ford announced the 2019 budget which included a section setting out its intention to look at creating a regulated online casino market.
November 2020: The government began moving the proposal through the provincial legislature.
2021: The various bills pertaining to the market launch were passed and came into force. This year also saw the regulator iGaming Ontario (iGO) established as a subsidiary of the OLG, for dealing specifically with online online casinos, and the opening of the license application process.
April 4, 2022: This was the official launch date of a regulated market. The process took months to come together, with regulators and operators working together to ensure compliance with all new laws and rules. The market launched with fewer than 10 operators available, although this would soon expand.
October 2022: This was the deadline for offshore operators after which it would be considered illegal for them to offer services to Ontarians. During these transitional months they could decide to either wind down operations in the state or cough up for the license application process.
2022 – 2026: These years saw rapid expansion, and a large transition of gamblers from offshore to regulated sites. In 2024 surveys suggested more than 86% of Ontario’s casino players were using regulated options, compared to 70% offshore before. The market started with less than 10 operators but by 2024 that number was just shy of 50 and today it is just over 70.
All of those changes have turned Ontario into one of the largest regulated online gambling markets in North America. Revenue recently topped CA$10 billion total since 2022, and yearly income grew 32% across 2025. That has also resulted billions paid in taxes and fees for the province.
With all this competition, customers increasingly look for ways to compare the regulated options in one place. Players in Ontario can explore a vast variety of online casinos via dedicated platforms like Casino.ca, that aggregate expert analysis and reviews of all the licensed casinos and what they offer. Customers can be confident Ontario’s regulation sets uniform standards but the exact details of game selection, payment options and bonuses or rewards can differ by casino, making comparative resources invaluable for informed decisions.
What this huge player adoption and growth shows us that opening up to competition for casino services can bring in players from offshore sites, showing that a competitive regulated model can work.
