CanadianGamingBusiness

Alberta is just a formality away from legalizing commercial online casino and sports betting.

Minister Dale Nally’s Bill 48 was passed by the provincial legislature’s Committee of the Whole and subsequently by the full Assembly at third reading on Wednesday evening. It leaves the United Conservative Party’s enabling legislation, titled the iGaming Alberta Act, just needing Royal Assent to be enacted.

The bill, which was passed on Wednesday without any amendments, will establish Canada’s second open, commercial, regulated online gambling market after Ontario opened its doors three years ago.

Alberta Gaming, Liquor and Cannabis (AGLC) will be the market regulator while still operating Play Alberta, currently the only regulated online gambling platform in the province. A new government agency, the Alberta iGaming Corporation, will conduct and manage the market and contract commercial online sportsbooks and online casinos.

Canadian Gaming Association President and CEO Paul Burns called the passage “a great milestone in the process.”

“The Canadian Gaming Association and its members extend their congratulations to Minister Dale Nally and the Government of Alberta for reaching this significant milestone and advancing towards the provision of regulated iGaming and enhanced consumer protections for its citizens,” added the CGA in a post.

Regulations will paint the picture
While legalization is clearly a vital step, there is a long way to go. Key details, including how many operators will be allowed in and what the tax rate and licensing fees will be, still need to be hashed out and an entire framework of regulations needs to be constructed.

“More details on key regulations and policies related to revenue, consumer protection and specific social responsibility policies will be shared later this year, following further engagement,” said Nally at third reading.

The bill has not faced much strong opposition in Alberta’s Assembly, but key concerns were repeatedly raised by the New Democratic Party (NDP) about the lack of specifics around responsible gambling and player protection in the bill text. A package of NDP amendments was voted down by the committee last week, and similar concerns were voiced at both committee stage and third reading on Wednesday before the bill was passed.

Nally has been unequivocal that responsible gambling should be a regulatory issue, not something written into the legislation. That way, he argued, changes can be made “on a dime” as required by the market rather than needing to go through a legislative process to come into force, offering more efficiency and flexibility.

One thing the bill does include is a centralized self-exclusion platform for gamblers across all commercial regulated sites, the type of which Ontario still does not have in place but is working to construct.

Online gambling is already happening
As was the case in Ontario before that province opened its market, advocates for Bill 48 pointed to the fact that a great deal of online gambling is already being done in Alberta, just without the revenue and player protection benefits of regulatory oversight.

AGLC said last year that it estimates that Play Alberta holds around 45% of the province’s online gambling market by revenue. Data provided to Canadian Gaming Business by H2 Gambling Capital put the share of online sports betting and online casino activity much lower, closer to 25%.

Legalizing and regulating online gambling is touted as an effective way to not only make online gambling safer for players and taxable for the government, but also to bolster consumer choice, drive innovation and create a greater economic benefit for the province via avenues such as direct and indirect job creation. In Ontario, the consensus is that those goals have largely been met.

When can business start?
As for when Alberta might be ready to open its doors, although Nally voiced optimism last fall that the market may be up and running in time fo the next NFL season this coming fall, the consensus today seems to be the first quarter of 2026.

Chief executives of numerous Ontario-licensed operators, including FanDuel, BetMGM, theScore Bet owner PENN Entertainment, BetRivers parent Rush Street Interactive and multi-brand operator Super Group have said this year that they are planning for Q1 2026 market entry.

Ontario’s licensed online casinos couldn’t use FINTRAC’s web portal to file any suspicious transaction reports between March 2024 and March 2025 following a hacking incident.

Business and technology publication The Logic reported that the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada’s portal, which is how Ontario operators submit their reports, was taken down by FINTRAC following a cyberattack in March 2024. The report notes that the portal is mainly used by small businesses; banks and most other large organizations use a secure data feed for filing reports, but iGaming Ontario (iGO) has allegedly not set up that avenue.

Hackers didn’t transfer sensitive data
Consequently, operators were left unable to report suspected money laundering or other suspected fraudulent activity, a state of play that extended for a year until iGO gave operators access again in March 2025 after FINTRAC completed an update of its tech systems and restored access.

FINTRAC stated that the attacker didn’t transfer any sensitive data, per The Logic.

iGO spokesperson Josh Elliott confirmed to the publication that the conduct-and-manage agency is building its own improved and automated system for filing such reports. Canadian Gaming Business reached out to iGO seeking more information, but has not received a response yet.

Authorized online gaming operators in Ontario must file suspicious transaction reports manually and upload them one at a time on a per-incident basis via the FINTRAC portal, although they do have the option to use their own in-house automation technology to speed up the process.

iGO has submitted 80K reports to FINTRAC
Some 49 licensed commercial operators are active in the Ontario market as of May 5 and the largest of them file thousands of reports every year. Elliott said that iGO has submitted more than 80,000 reports to FINTRAC on behalf of operators since April 2022, and the agency and its contracted operator partners are working on clearing the backlog that remains.

Ontario’s 49 operators, who run a combined 84 online gambling platforms, collectively handled almost $83 billion in player activity in the 2024-25 fiscal year alone. That year ran from April 1, 2024, to March 31, 2025; for almost the entirety of that period, they could not file suspicious activity reports via FINTRAC.

Canadian Gaming Association President and CEO Paul Burns told The Logic that the FINTRAC downtime has “been awful for everybody.”

Observers suggest Canadian gambling has a fraud problem
The CGA has made anti-money laundering a core issue of its advocacy. It noted in its 2024 Advocacy Policies that one of its goals for last year was to “actively participate” in the parliamentary review of the Proceeds of Crime (Money Laundering) and Terrorist Financing Act (PCMLTF Act) to ensure Canada’s AML laws and regulations can keep up with the evolution of online gambling.

Last October, a report from TransUnion Canada found that online gambling is the most susceptible sector in the country when it comes to digital fraud attempts, and the rate of instances within Canadian-specific gambling soared 79.3% year-over-year.

TransUnion Canada Head of Identity Management and Fraud Solutions Patrick Boudreau urged businesses including gambling operators to make technology such as identity verification, IP intelligence, device reputation and synthetic identity detection “critical components” of their fraud prevention programs.

In January of this year, FINTRAC publicly warned that known fentanyl traffickers were believed to be using online gambling platforms to launder money from dealing and production, disguising the deposits and withdrawals as wagering winnings.

Under its “general money laundering indicators,” FINTRAC notes that a client making high-volume or frequent purchases from a personal account to online gambling platforms and subsequently receiving funds into the same account from payment processors associated with online gambling platforms is “an unusual pattern” that warrants close attention.

In its first discussion in the Alberta legislature’s Committee of the Whole on Tuesday, lawmakers voted down proposed amendments to the iGaming Alberta Act that would have written more responsible gambling measures into law.

Minister Dale Nally’s Bill 48 passed second reading on April 16 and was referred to the committee, which comprises all members of the legislative assembly (MLAs).

The bill would create the legal framework for a regulated commercial online gambling market in Alberta. It would create a new government agency, the Alberta iGaming Corporation, which would conduct and manage the market, much like iGaming Ontario does in Canada’s first and so far only regulated private-sector iGaming market. Alberta Gaming, Liquor and Cannabis (AGLC) would function as the regulator of the market and also continue to operate its own Play Alberta platform.

NDP’s pushback outvoted
Before it advanced to committee discussion, the New Democratic Party (NDP) expressed concerns about the lack of details it includes, particularly with respect to player protection and other safeguards.

In its first committee debate, the conversation once around centred on what is — and, more prominently, what isn’t — included in the bill’s language around responsible gambling.

On Tuesday, NDP MLA Gurinder Brar, one of the most vocal critics in the earlier session, proposed a set of amendments that would require the province to set up a dedicated online responsible gambling program based on harm reduction principles. The Alberta iGaming Corporation would have to carry out mandatory independent evaluations of its effectiveness as well as annual public reporting.

“The basic process of public policy is to design it, to implement it and to evaluate it. And if there are gaps, those gaps must be addressed and fixed,” Brar told the chamber. “And that’s exactly what these amendments are.”

Although Brar’s proposal was supported by multiple other NDP MLAs, with one arguing that Bill 48 is a “deeply incomplete” piece of legislation that “invites more questions than answers”, the amendment package was ultimately defeated by a vote of 38 nays to 16 yays.

Government argues RG should be in regs, not legislation
In response to Brar’s monologue, Nally argued that responsible gambling programs should and will be a regulatory issue rather than a legal one.

“We don’t want to put player safety in legislation,” he stressed. “We want to put it in regulation so that if we see something we want to turn around on a dime, we’re able to do it through an order in council, not a new piece of legislation.

“I’m saying this to make the conversations shorter around this room: We don’t have to debate player safety, gambling responsibility. There is no light between us. I assure you, we are all 100% aligned … But we’re going to do it in the most efficient and effective manner possible, and that’s through regulation.”

Supporting Brar’s amendment, his fellow NDP MLA Nathan Ip countered that omitting specific RG measures from the legislation itself is in itself a gamble on Albertans’ well-being.

“The risk is that these protections will come too late, if at all.”

Another NDP MLA, Joe Ceci, argued that the amendments could actually fit neatly into the bill’s language, noting that the legislation already includes some standard requirements on player protection.

“So, asking now to put those in legislation is not such a big leap as was suggested a little while ago by the Minister.”

Despite those calls for a pivot, the committee voted down the amendments and seems primed to approve the bill. That would send it back to the full legislature for third and final reading, where the large incumbent United Conservative Party (UCP) majority suggests it is highly likely to pass.