Taliesin Schecter-Taylor has always seen sports as more than just background noise.
The first-year Sport Management student at Humber Polytechnic started noticing a trend of the same thing appearing over and over whenever he turned on the TV to watch the Blue Jays, gambling advertisements.
Seventeen at the time, now 19, Schecter-Taylor didn’t pay much attention to these ads, treating them as any other advertisement that is shown during commercial breaks for sports.
“When I got closer to 19, it had more influence on me online gambling,” he said.
As sports gambling advertisements become more normalized and flood television screens, social media and even the teams’ jerseys, professionals are alerting those who are most vulnerable and fighting for regulations to be put in place.
When Bill C-218, also known as the Safe and Regulated Sports Betting Act, was introduced by the federal government on August 27, 2021, it legalized betting on single-game sports.
Senator Marty Deacon, the sponsor of Bill S-269, tabled it to regulate sports advertising. She said wanted the bill initially because she thought it would bring regulation to betting.
“I think, to be fair, it was rushed through before an election, and we didn't put the time and attention or anticipate the plethora of advertising that would come out,” Deacon said.
Although it became legal to bet on sports at the federal level, the provinces were in control of how they wanted to approach their availability to bet, as well as the rules and regulations.
Ontario became the first, and to this day only, province to allow private operators to offer their games to residents on April 4, 2022. A new subsidiary of the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario (AGCO) was created, iGaming Ontario (iGO).
In just its two years of existence, iGO, along with its operators, generated a combined total of $98.8 billion in total wagers and $3.3 billion in total revenue, with $891 million just from sports betting, according to iGO’s 2022-2023 and 2023-2024 annual reports.
The province now has 49 operators registered with the AGCO, and 84 gaming websites, with 33 having a sportsbook.
Since Ontario allowed residents to bet with private operators, it also allowed those same operators to advertise their services to television audiences throughout the province.
All advertisement regulations are set by the AGCO, with ads they said should contain messages towards responsible gambling, "where effective.”
The corporations that hold the rights to broadcast the games said in a statement to CBC Marketplace that the AGCO reviews and approves all sports-related betting ads they air.
A study from the University of Bristol, in collaboration with CBC Marketplace, found 21.6 per cent of the live coverage broadcast contained the logo of a betting company or reference to gambling.
Deacon said she thinks they can’t ban the advertising completely, but hopefully limit and regulate the frequency of it, just like alcohol and cannabis.
“We think we can reach the bar for minimizing advertising the same way as cannabis and alcohol are,” she said.
Deacon said Bill S-269 can help Canada match countries in Europe that are six or seven years ahead in terms of regulations. Adapting some of their techniques, such as banning celebrities from appearing in the ads, and banning ads from appearing five minutes before or after the start of a game.
She said the April 28 federal election prorogued the government and delayed their progress. She compared it to “taking my bill and throwing it on the floor.
“But the good thing is, when we get the government up and going again, we can get this reset and repassed through the house and get things on track to get it back on the table and get it passed,” Deacon said.
She said the bill is a national framework, they will bring professionals from every side of sports to support regulations, and hopefully come to an agreement, so Canadians can enjoy watching sports again.
Steve Joordens, a psychology professor at the University of Toronto and representative of the Canadian Psychological Association, said the advertisements make the viewer believe sports betting is a normal, or even beyond normal, thing to participate in.
“They're kind of suggesting that if you're a real sports fan, if you truly care about sports, then you should get in the game, get off the sidelines,” Joordens said. “And what they're suggesting there is that real sports fans don't just watch games. They put money on them. They bet on them.”
Joordens said the betting companies use every “trick” to persuade a viewer to bet on the game. The main one is using faces in the ads, people who are appreciated and seen as representatives of what it means to play that sport.
He said they show happy people in the ads to convince the viewers that betting on sports is fun, but don’t show the depressed people, who have lost thousands of dollars, and are at their wits’ end.
“Every suicide website now has a place for problem gamblers, specifically, because it's become such a strong driver of suicide,” Joordens said.
He said nobody should be trying to sell gambling to an audience, just like alcohol and cannabis, it should require someone to find it themselves, instead of pushing it in their face all the time.
“The people that want to bet should be allowed to bet, but they should have nothing to do with the actual sport itself,” Joordens said. “It should be a completely adjacent activity.”
A Statistics Canada study from 2022 found nearly two-thirds (64.5 per cent) of Canadians aged 15 or older (18.9 million) reported gambling in the last year. More than 300,000 of those gamblers were at a moderate-to-severe risk of gambling problems.
The survey also found that males were more likely to report gambling, but were also more likely to be at risk of starting a gambling addiction.
Bruce Kidd, co-founder of BanAdsForGambling.ca, said he started the campaign because he was disgusted by the ads and the message that the only way to enjoy sports was to bet on them.
“We looked around for an organization to fight the ads, and found none in Canada, so we started one,” he said.
Kidd said the ads “poison” what sports mean to the viewers, convincing young adults to start bad betting habits before they can even legally bet themselves.
“It’s an extension of the worst aspects of capitalism cannibalizing the culture of sports,” he said.
As a sports fan, Schecter-Taylor just hopes there is some attention brought to advertising, so he can go back to watching sports as a fan, not as a bettor.
“The frequency and runtime (need) to be limited so that people can play responsibly but avoid the feeling of missing out or the need to start gambling because of the ads,” he said.
