Canadian politicians call on Mark Carney to ban sports gambling ads

Two Canadian Senators are calling for a ban on all advertising for sports gambling and are reaching out to Prime Minister Mark Carney to take action.

Senators Percy Downe of Charlottetown and Marty Deacon of Waterloo have the support of 40 other Senators who are calling for an outright ban on sports advertising, similar to the outright ban in Canada on tobacco advertising.

Downe says he believes that the issue has gotten worse since 2021 when the Canadian government legalized single-event sports betting, otherwise known as prop-bets.

"You can now bet on who will score in the next five minutes, what the odds are," Downe said to CBC.

"Everybody in effect is carrying a mini casino in their pocket. It's enticing more and more people to participate and many people, unfortunately, will suffer as a result of that."

The government has created some restrictions around sports gambling ads, namely they banned the use of celebrity and sports personalities from marketing. You may recall that Connor McDavid, Auston Matthews and Wayne Gretzky all factored into sports gambling ads in the past, but new laws prevent them from acting as a spokesperson for gambling sites/apps.

"For the very same reason we banned cigarette ads on all platforms, we should ban this because of the harm it does to society, and there's no benefit," Downe.

"You can't legislate away human weaknesses, but you can legislate away the ability of others to take advantage of them."

It's obvious to any Canadian hockey fan that the government MUST do something about sports gambling ads. Every commercial break is just a non-stop feed of ads from the likes of BET365, BET99, NorthStar Bets, Sports Interaction, Bet MGM, etc. If not an outright ban, there needs to be some serious regulations in place for the amount of ads viewers see and the types of viewer that these ads are targeting.