Recently, Paul Burns, president and CEO of the Canadian Gaming Association, was asked on a BNN Bloomberg television newscast about the topic of banning gambling ads in Ontario.
Does Ontario need to eliminate the ads? Why are superstar athletes making gambling enticing for young people and those vulnerable to gambling addiction? These are the types of questions people in the industry like Burns are hearing now.
Having a regulated environment, like the one in place in Ontario now, is part of the response to that, Burns said in the interview. The standards and regulations around advertising are lengthy, in terms of what can be advertised and how it can be advertised, making sure false messages are not being promoted.
Plus, operators are required to monitor player’s behavior for risk and with that comes interventions. The industry does pay attention, Burns said, to what customers like and don’t like. Gambling advertising has been around for decades, the industry is making sure it’s being done in a responsible manner, the gaming industry doesn’t target minors, and lots of guardrails are already in the system.
Not good enough for The Campaign to Ban Advertising for Gambling (BAFG) advocacy group. For them, the solution is cut and dried: Put in the same controls we see for tobacco and cannabis advertising and ban it entirely.
CDC Gaming Reports caught up with John Sewell, the lawyer and former Toronto mayor who is on the organization’s steering committee. He serves along with Karl Subban, retired school principal, author, and hockey dad; Bruce Kidd, academic, author, and former athlete; and several others.
What is the objective of your organization?
We think trying to restrict gambling advertising doesn’t work very well, just looking at what they’ve tried in Europe. We would take the same position that is taken with respect to tobacco and cannabis. Advertising should be banned. I think (banning advertising) has worked perfectly well for both of those products and we think it should work for gambling as well. Gambling is registered as an addiction by the American Psychiatric Association. It’s the only non-substance kind of addiction that they list. It’s clear it’s a very substantial problem. But every time you’re trying to watch a game, you’re confronted with someone telling you to bet on something. We aren’t trying to ban gambling, just advertising.
Does your organization see gambling as dangerous?
It causes lots of problems. Three percent of people who gamble are considered to be problem gamblers. And we know gambling can cause extraordinary havoc in their families and with their close relations and financial havoc. The data out of Britain is very worrisome. They think on average 400 youth under 21 commit suicide every year because of gambling. People get in far over their heads and they don’t know what else to do. They just say they’ll kill themselves to get out of a mess, then nobody has to deal with it. And that’s just unbelievable.
But what about beer ads?
One of the things about beer ads is that they aren’t allowed to show people drinking beer. In gambling ads, you can always show people winning. That’s what’s happening. The problem is every time you put out an ad, it triggers something in a gambler’s mind saying, OK maybe I could win this one. And that seems to be a problem. That’s why I think we have to go further than what we’ve done with alcohol.
What about the counter arguments, that the industry has guardrails in place?
If you talk to psychologists who deal with youth, they’ll tell you a substantial number of kids are now gambling, putting in false information on the registration, getting somebody else to register them, so they can use that account. And the question of how the industry is dealing with it, I’m not sure all these other guardrails are going to be effective.
I think we have an obligation to deal seriously with social ills. And certainly the fact that people get addicted to gambling is a big social ill. That’s not to prevent gambling, but basically to take away from the public sphere the fact that everywhere you look, there’s an ad that says to gamble. My colleague Bruce Kidd, who was a significant athlete in Canada, makes the point that this demeans sports. This isn’t what sports is about. We’ve had public statements by Fred VanVleet and Chris Boucher (of the NBA’s Toronto Raptors) saying they were harassed by fans, that they didn’t score the points they were supposed to in order for the fan to win bets. So they’re being intimidated and that’s not good.
Are there other ways gambling ads can involve athletes, to promote responsible gambling, for example?
At the end of the ad, they always say to play responsibly. With that little tagline, they’re basically saying to ignore the advertisement. It’s a bit of a joke. I don’t believe that works. What they’ve tried in Britain, where you can’t advertise during a game, I don’t think that works either.
One of the significant issues is the amount of money involved in advertising. As we know, in its first year of operations, Ontario produced over $35 billion worth of business. We’re dealing with really significant money. We have no question there will be a big fight back on (what we’re doing). There was a big fight back on tobacco advertising from the tobacco companies. But we think the data is pretty strong. There is a serious health risk. We get very powerful and extensive feedback. Many people in Canada think this is a serious problem.
Virtually everybody we talked to says, ‘Yeah, aren’t those (gambling) ads awful?’ That doesn’t mean all of them are saying ads should be banned. What we’re hearing now is that people in the House of Commons and Senate who voted for the legislation in 2021 (that lifted restrictions on single-event sports betting) never thought we’d be deluged with all these ads and now want to do something about it.
