Sports betting has moved from the edges of youth culture into the same digital environment as scores, highlights and social media. Ontario’s newest student-health numbers show how quickly that shift has accelerated: 10% of students in grades 7 through 12 reported gambling on sports online at least once in the previous year, up from about 1% in 2019.
What makes the number especially striking is the environment surrounding it. Online gambling overall is rising among Ontario students, while gambling promotion has become highly visible to young audiences. Nearly one-quarter of students reported encountering online gambling advertising every day. The numbers do not establish that legalization, private operators or advertising caused the increase on their own, but they show that sports wagering has become a significant part of the digital world surrounding Ontario adolescents.
A Tenfold Rise That Changes the Baseline
CAMH’s 2025 Ontario Student Drug Use and Health Survey recorded one of its most dramatic gambling shifts in online sports betting. About 10% of students in grades 7 through 12 said they had participated during the previous 12 months. When CAMH measured the behaviour in 2019, the proportion was roughly 1%. That means participation increased approximately tenfold between those two measurement points. Canadian Press coverage of the newly released numbers also notes that the rate was about one in 100 students in 2017, underscoring how uncommon the behaviour was less than a decade ago.
The 10% figure needs to be interpreted carefully. It measures whether a student reported online sports gambling at least once during the previous year; it does not mean one in 10 Ontario students is gambling every week, spending large amounts or experiencing a gambling disorder. Still, even occasional participation matters when the population involved is largely below Ontario’s legal age for regulated internet gambling. A behaviour that once registered near the margins is now common enough to appear in an average-sized group of students.
Boys and Older Students Stand Out
The increase is not evenly distributed across Ontario classrooms. CAMH found that 14.9% of male students reported online sports gambling during the previous year, compared with 4.7% of female students. That makes the reported rate among boys and young men more than three times the rate among girls and young women. The pattern also became more pronounced with age: participation increased from 6.7% among Grade 7 students to 13% among those in Grade 12.
Put into everyday terms, a 13% rate would amount to roughly four students in a group of 30 if that particular group happened to mirror the provincial estimate. That is only an illustration, not a prediction for an individual classroom, but it helps show the scale involved. Geography appears less important than age and sex. CAMH did not identify a statistically significant regional difference in online sports gambling across Ontario. The trend therefore cannot easily be dismissed as a phenomenon concentrated only in Toronto, another major city or one part of the province.
Sports Betting Is Part of a Wider Online Gambling Shift
Sports wagering is the standout change, but it is not occurring in isolation. CAMH found that 11.6% of Ontario students reported some form of online gambling during the previous year, including sports betting, online poker or casino-style gambling. That was up from 7.9% in 2023. Male students again reported substantially greater participation, at 16.6%, compared with 6% among female students. Other forms of online gambling, such as poker and casino games, were reported by 6.6% of students.
When offline activities are included, the picture becomes broader still. About 19.9% of students reported participating in at least one gambling activity during the previous year. The proportion was 24.9% among male students and 14.4% among females. Traditional gambling has therefore not disappeared as digital betting has expanded. Instead, mobile and online products have added another pathway. For families and educators, that distinction matters because gambling no longer necessarily involves entering a casino, approaching a lottery counter or visibly exchanging cash. An entire transaction can potentially exist within the digital environment already central to adolescent life.
Gambling Advertising Is Already Part of Teen Media Life
Perhaps the clearest indication of how deeply gambling has entered the youth media environment comes from advertising exposure. CAMH found that 80.3% of students reported seeing or hearing advertising for online gambling during the previous month through television, radio or the internet. More strikingly, 23.4% said they encountered such promotion every day. Daily exposure was considerably higher among male students, at 30.9%, compared with 15.2% among female students.
Exposure also rose markedly across grades. About 15.6% of Grade 7 students reported encountering online gambling advertisements daily, while the rate reached 31.3% by Grade 12. Those numbers matter because modern sports betting promotion can appear alongside the entertainment itself — during broadcasts, sports commentary and digital content — rather than in a separate gambling environment. CAMH has specifically raised concerns about the normalization that can occur when gambling promotion becomes routine around sports. The numbers do not establish that an advertisement causes an individual student to bet. They do establish that exposure is widespread, including among children several years below the legal age for Ontario’s regulated online market.
Ontario’s Betting Market Changed Fast
The student numbers emerged after a major transformation in Canada’s legal sports-betting landscape. Parliament passed legislation in 2021 allowing provinces and territories to conduct and manage betting on individual sporting events, removing a longstanding federal restriction that had generally limited legal sports wagering to parlay-style products. Ontario then opened its regulated competitive internet-gaming market on April 4, 2022, allowing approved private operators to offer online casino games and sports betting under provincial oversight.
The adult market expanded rapidly. In its first fiscal year, iGaming Ontario reported nearly $35.5 billion in wagers from more than 1.6 million active player accounts, with 46 operators and more than 70 gaming websites by year-end. By fiscal 2024-25, the regulated market recorded $82.7 billion in wagers and more than 2.6 million active accounts. Those figures describe legal adult activity, not teen participation, and they should not be conflated with CAMH’s student numbers. Nor does the timing prove that market liberalization caused youth betting to rise. It does show, however, that Ontario adolescents have grown up during an unusually rapid expansion of legal sports-betting brands, products and public visibility.
The Legal Age Is 19, but the Exposure Starts Much Earlier
Ontario’s regulated online gambling rules are straightforward on age: a person must be at least 19 to participate in internet gaming conducted and managed by iGaming Ontario. Authorized operators are also expected to maintain controls intended to prevent underage access. Yet CAMH’s numbers cover students beginning in Grade 7, making the reported level of participation notable precisely because most of the population being measured is well below that threshold.
The available student numbers do not explain exactly how underage participants are wagering. They do not establish whether bets were made through provincially regulated operators, offshore or unregulated websites, accounts belonging to other people, informal pools or some other route. That missing detail is important. A 10% participation rate cannot automatically be treated as evidence that one particular age-verification system has failed. What it does establish is a gap between the legal rules and reported behaviour. CAMH researcher Dr. Peter Selby highlighted that tension when the results were released, saying the increase raises questions about how young people gain access despite age restrictions. Understanding that pathway may be one of the most important next steps for regulators and researchers.
Advertising Rules Tightened, but Youth Exposure Remains High
Ontario has already responded to some concerns about the way gambling is marketed. The Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario prohibits broad public advertising of bonuses, credits and other gambling inducements. Beginning February 28, 2024, the regulator also prohibited operators from using athletes in gambling advertising except for responsible-gambling advocacy and restricted the use of personalities who could reasonably be expected to appeal to minors.
Those changes arrived before much of CAMH’s 2025 data collection, which ran from December 2024 through June 2025. Yet more than four in five students still reported some exposure to online gambling advertising in the previous month, and almost one in four reported daily exposure. That does not necessarily mean operators violated the standards. Regulations aimed at preventing advertising specifically directed toward minors are different from preventing minors from seeing advertising that is directed toward adults during broadly consumed sports and entertainment. The distinction helps explain why the policy debate has moved beyond the content of individual commercials toward questions about overall volume, placement and gambling promotion around live sports.
Research Links Advertising Exposure With Gambling Behaviour
Ontario’s student numbers arrive amid a growing academic debate about what persistent sports-gambling advertising does to behaviour. A 2025 systematic review published in Addiction examined 22 quantitative studies covering traditional advertising, digital marketing, sponsorship, direct promotion and betting inducements. Researchers found that exposure was associated with outcomes including greater gambling frequency, increased spending, unplanned betting and a greater likelihood of gambling. Some evidence suggested stronger effects among people already at higher risk of gambling harm.
There are important limits to applying that work directly to Ontario teenagers. Sixteen of the 22 studies were conducted in Australia, most involved adults, and much of the evidence was observational rather than experimental. The review therefore supports an association, not a simple conclusion that advertisements caused Ontario’s tenfold rise. Even so, the combination is difficult for public-health researchers to ignore: Ontario now has both widespread adolescent exposure to gambling promotion and sharply higher reported online sports betting. That makes youth-specific Canadian research increasingly important, particularly research capable of separating the influence of advertising from factors such as peer behaviour, technology, product availability and changing cultural attitudes toward betting.
The Risk Goes Beyond Losing a Few Dollars
Concern about youth sports betting is not limited to how many students have tried it. Separate Ontario health research suggests gambling-related problems have increasingly appeared among adolescent boys and young men as online gambling expanded. A 2026 peer-reviewed analysis of ConnexOntario contacts examined gambling-related help-seeking between January 2012 and September 2025. Researchers found particularly large increases among males aged 15 to 24 after Ontario’s private online market opened.
Compared with a model in which private online gambling had not been introduced, gambling-related contacts for males aged 15 to 24 were estimated to be 144% higher by September 2025. Compared with a scenario in which neither private online gambling nor the earlier PlayOLG platform had existed, the estimated increase reached 337.8%. During the private-market period, boys and men aged 15 through 44 accounted for 88.9% of sports-gambling contacts. Those results cannot show that every extra call was caused directly by legalization, and the researchers explicitly noted that rising contacts could reflect more gambling problems, greater willingness to seek help, or both. Still, the demographic overlap with CAMH’s higher male student participation is notable.
Ontario Now Faces a Prevention Test
CAMH’s results are powerful because of their scale, but they also come with boundaries. The 2025 Ontario Student Drug Use and Health Survey drew self-reported information from 11,108 students in grades 7 through 12, covering 246 schools and 42 school boards. Data were collected anonymously between December 2024 and June 2025. The OSDUHS has operated every two years since 1977, making it Canada’s longest-running ongoing school-based examination of adolescent health behaviours and allowing researchers to identify changes that might be invisible in a one-time snapshot.
What the numbers cannot do is assign a single cause to the increase. They cannot determine from prevalence alone whether advertising, market expansion, peer influence, smartphone access, changing attitudes or another factor played the decisive role. That distinction should shape Ontario’s response. The immediate challenge is not simply proving that teenagers have heard of sports betting; the evidence already shows extensive exposure. The harder task is identifying how underage betting occurs, which young people are progressing from experimentation toward harmful behaviour, and which prevention measures actually reduce that risk without mistaking correlation for causation.
