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Sports betting explodes across Canada

Since Canada legalized sports betting in 2021, the industry has exploded, and last week the Edmonton Oilers and the Alberta government were just the latest to cash in. On Sept. 9 the Oilers announced that they were getting sponsored by Play Alberta – the government’s own online gambling platform – to put a patch on the team’s home jerseys. Many fans weren’t impressed; an online poll by the Edmonton Journal’s hockey writer David Staples had the majority annoyed with the Oilers for degrading their uniform. But what about a government that promotes a vice that harms their own citizens?

Those harms aren’t limited to Alberta. With three years of data on hand, the Christian think tank Cardus has just published an extensive report about the hidden harms of sports betting in Ontario.

Their report shared that sports viewers in Ontario now get hit with 2.8 gambling references every minute of a live sports broadcast. The advertising is effective – the number of sports betting accounts is climbing quickly in Ontario, from 492,000 in the first quarter of 2023, to 1.3 million today. The average being lost by each of those 1.3 million gamblers is $283 each month. As is always the case with gambling, the biggest winner is the company, organization, or government behind the scheme. Revenue from betting increased from an already huge $368.1 million to a staggering $588 million just from 2023 to 2024.

It isn’t only sports betting that has taken off. Revenue from casino gaming saw an even greater spike, doubling from $854.8 million to $1.78 billion.

Gambling is bad stewardship of what God has entrusted to us, because the odds are always stacked in favor of the house. Even if you do win it is only because your neighbor has lost, and lost big. And gambling is also addictive – sadly, those who have the least to steward are often the most likely to be hurt by this addiction, adding the additional yoke of debt to their already-challenging lives.

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Gambling as the new norm? Christians still need to say no

Estimates had Americans betting a record $23 billion on Super Bowl LVIII, up more than a third from the $16 billion that was wagered in 2023. Among the betters was one Cardinal Pritchard, who shared that he’d made a wager in an article for the news site Not the Bee. Pritchard didn’t specify how much he bet, so it could have been trivial. What is notable is that he publicized it on a specifically Christian website and in making his admission there, he was acting as if it’s no big thing for Christians to gamble. The irony is that he did so in an article on the enormity of America’s gambling problem – Pritchard reported that an estimated 67.8 million Americans placed a bet on the Super Bowl, for an average of well over $300 a bet! Gambling is a bad bet Big, too, is just how common gambling has become – that works out to almost 1 in 5 Americans. Pritchard actually reported it as 1 in 4, but his math was off. Bad math is, of course, an ailment common to gamblers, who make the repeated mistake of thinking that this time they’ll come out ahead. But in a bit of computation that should be a part of every Christian high school math curriculum, if you engage in any sort of regular gambling the odds are going to get you in the end. Why? Because casinos and online sites take their percentage, so what’s paid out will always be less than what was paid in. Thus one of the reasons Christians shouldn’t gamble is because it’s a bad use of the resources God has given us. It’s worse than what the one servant did in the Parable of the Talents (Matt. 25: 14-30) who buried the money his master entrusted to him, and didn’t even put it in the bank to earn some interest. How much angrier would his master have been if the servant had come back with half a talent, having frittered the rest away in gambling? Or if he’d come back with a debt of several talents? Even when you win gambling is bad news But what if you are an especially good gambler, defying the odds to actually win more than you lose? Would it be okay for a Christian to gamble if he could turn a profit? No, but for a different reason. When you win at gambling it is only because someone else lost. Whatever your gain, it is someone else’s pain. Sometimes investing is likened to gambling, but a key difference is that if I make money on a business investment, it can be as the result of that business doing something to benefit many others. A company like Costco grows in value because it opens more stores that serve more people some good values. Your gain as a Costco stockholder comes at the general populace’s gain too. But in gambling, you only win because someone else has lost. And that’s not loving your neighbor (Matt. 22:35-40). Add to this the number of people who get addicted to gambling and lose everything. And then consider how, in Canada, provincial governments have a big hand in pushing gambling, and thus a big hand in destroying these lives. While I couldn’t dig up the specifics for the Canadian Super Bowl wager numbers, gambling is big business in Canada too, as evidenced by the sheer volume of sports gambling ads on television. A peek at government coffers shows their own heavy dependence on gambling. Alberta, for example, is expecting to take in $1.5 billion in 2023-2024, or, more than $300 per citizen. God’s people need to understand why gambling is wrong so we can steer clear of this entrapment. And in steering clear we can also be a good neighbor to others by “denormalizing” gambling. Just say no, for everyone’s sake....