British Columbia Only Kept Half Its Online Gambling Market. So Which Canadian Province Opens Up Next?

Canada’s gambling market is being rebuilt one province at a time, and not everyone is doing it the same way. British Columbia recently learned the hard way what happens when a province half-opens its doors rather than fully committing: private operators moved in fast, and the province’s own government-run platform is left holding onto barely half of the online market it used to have almost entirely to itself.

That is the backdrop to Alberta’s launch last month. Where BC kept a single government-run site as the only legal option and only grudgingly let a handful of private brands in, Alberta went the other way. It opened properly, in the same style Ontario did back in 2022, letting licensed private operators compete from day one rather than treating them as an afterthought. The early signs suggest that is the version that actually works, at least if the goal is pulling gambling money out of unregulated offshore sites and into a taxed, licensed system.

For anyone trying to make sense of who is actually operating in Alberta now, and on what terms, Gambling.com, home of the Alberta online casino guide, keeps a running list of licensed brands and how the province’s rollout compares to what has happened elsewhere in Canada.

The obvious question after Alberta is who is next. Manitoba has been watching closely. So has Saskatchewan. Neither has committed to a firm date, but both have said publicly they are studying what happened in Ontario and, more recently, in Alberta, before deciding how far to open their own markets. The Alberta Gaming, Liquor and Cannabis Commission has effectively become a test case other provincial regulators are quietly picking apart, looking for what worked and what did not. Alberta has been open about its own reasons for opening the market, which gives those regulators a clear rationale to weigh.

It is a slower process than it probably needs to be, but Canada’s federal structure makes that unavoidable. Gambling regulation sits with the provinces, not with Ottawa, so there is no single body that can wave a market open nationwide. Ontario’s Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario built its own licensing framework from scratch. Alberta’s AGLC built a different one. Whatever Manitoba eventually rolls out will be its own thing too, shaped by its own politics and its own existing casino operators, who will want a say in how much competition they are suddenly exposed to.

British Columbia is the cautionary tale in all this. The province tried a middle path, keeping its BCLC-run PlayNow platform as the default and only reluctantly licensing a small number of private operators alongside it. The result is a market now roughly split down the middle between the government platform and everyone else, which is not what anyone in Victoria was hoping for when they first floated the idea of opening up. Players clearly wanted more choice than one government-run site could give them, and once they had even a little of that choice, they took it.

There is a version of this story that is about tax revenue and market share, and a version that is about something more basic: people do not love being told there is only one legal place to spend their money, even when that one place is perfectly fine. Give them a second or third option, licensed and regulated the same as the first, and plenty will drift toward whichever offers the better bonus or the smoother app. That is not a uniquely Canadian lesson. It is the same reason local shops end up rethinking how they take payments and manage cash flow once customers have more places to go, something covered well in this piece on modern business finance for local shop owners, even if the industries could not be more different.

What happens next probably depends less on ideology than on money. Ontario’s numbers were strong enough to convince Alberta to follow. If Alberta’s first year lives up to the revenue estimates being floated, that is likely to tip Manitoba and Saskatchewan toward the fuller Ontario-Alberta model rather than British Columbia’s more cautious one. Nobody in provincial government wants to be the one explaining why they left money on the table, or why their carefully controlled market quietly lost half its business to operators next door that never had to ask permission twice.

Article written by Dave Mannion