For most of the last century, if you wanted to put money on one hockey game in Canada, you could not do it legally. You could bet a parlay, a bundle of several outcomes that all had to land, through a provincial lottery product. A single game on its own was off the table, and had been since the relevant section of the Criminal Code was written.
That changed in 2021, through a route almost nobody expected: a private member’s bill.
The Law That Was Actually in the Way
The obstacle was a single paragraph. Section 207(4)(b) of the Criminal Code excluded betting on a race, a fight, a single sport event or an athletic contest from the lottery schemes that provinces were otherwise permitted to conduct and manage.
Everything else about Canadian gambling law flowed around that clause. Provinces could run casinos, lotteries and parlay betting because those fell inside the permitted category. Single-event wagering sat outside it, which is why Canadians who wanted it used offshore sites instead, in enormous volume and with no domestic oversight whatsoever.
A Private Member’s Bill Got There First
Bill C-218, the Safe and Regulated Sports Betting Act, was introduced by Saskatchewan MP Kevin Waugh. Private members’ bills rarely become law, and this was the third serious attempt at this particular change dating back to 2012.
It also had competition. The federal government introduced its own bill, C-13, covering similar ground. In the end the private member’s bill was the one that finished, passing the Senate on 22 June 2021 by 57 votes to 20 and receiving royal assent a week later on 29 June. The Parliament of Canada’s legislative record for Bill C-218 tracks the whole passage, including the committee stages and the government statements that followed.
The amendment itself is short. It removed the single-event exclusion, leaving horse racing under the pre-existing federal pari-mutuel rules, and handed everything else to the provinces.
The Provinces Got the Actual Decision
This is the part most coverage glossed over at the time. C-218 did not legalise single-event betting so much as make it legal for provinces to decide to offer it.
The result was ten different answers. British Columbia and Alberta moved almost immediately through their existing lottery corporations. Ontario went further and built a competitive market in which private operators could be registered and compete, which launched in April 2022 and is the reason the Ontario landscape looks nothing like the rest of the country’s.
What Ontario Built
Ontario’s model splits the job between two organisations. The Alcohol and Gaming Commission registers operators and sets the standards they must meet. iGaming Ontario holds the commercial agreements with them.
The standards cover the things that were entirely absent from the offshore market Canadians had been using: verified identity before a customer can deposit, an enforced minimum age of 19, independently tested games, player funds held separately from operating funds, anti-money-laundering controls, and participation in a province-wide self-exclusion system that covers every registered operator at once. An operator running a sports betting site in the province is doing so inside that framework, with a regulator that can investigate complaints and a defined escalation path when something goes wrong. Compared with an offshore operator answerable to nobody in Canada, that is a materially different proposition for the person holding the account.
The Argument That Won
The case made during the parliamentary debate is worth understanding because it explains the shape of what followed.
It was not that betting is good. It was that Canadians were already doing it, at scale, through channels with no consumer protection, no age verification worth the name and no domestic tax base. The federal justice minister’s statement on royal assent framed it in those terms: bringing a common practice into a legal, regulated and safe environment.
Whether the regulated market has fully delivered on that is a fair question and the evidence is still accumulating. What is not in dispute is that the offshore alternative offered none of it.
What Actually Changed for Players
Four concrete differences, all of which apply from the moment someone opens an account.
Identity is verified rather than asserted, which is why signing up takes longer than it used to and why the age floor means something. Funds are held separately, so a company failure does not automatically consume player balances. Complaints have somewhere to go. And a person who wants to stop can exclude themselves from every registered operator in the province with a single request rather than closing accounts one at a time.
None of that existed in the pre-2021 arrangement, and none of it exists on an unregulated site today.
The Part That Is Still Being Worked Out
Two threads remain live. Advertising volume drew enough public reaction that Ontario tightened its rules, removing public promotion of bonuses and inducements and restricting the use of athletes and figures likely to appeal to minors.
And the question of whether other provinces follow Ontario into a competitive private market, rather than running everything through a lottery corporation, is unresolved. Alberta has been moving in that direction. The rest have not committed.
Why This Matters to a Gaming Audience Specifically
For anyone in competitive gaming or esports, this history explains the environment you are looking at now. The regulated Canadian market that offers esports markets alongside hockey and football exists because of a two-paragraph amendment to the Criminal Code that squeaked through as a private member’s bill.
It also explains the distinction that matters most when choosing where to hold an account. Registered operators carry obligations that were written down, are supervised and can be enforced. Sites reachable through a browser from anywhere carry none, and the difference is not visible from the homepage.
Checking a provincial regulator’s public register before depositing anywhere takes under a minute, and it is the single most useful habit in this entire subject.