Atlantic Lottery Corporation and three other provincial lottery corporations have asked the Supreme Court of Canada to reject Ontario’s proposed international online gambling model.
The dispute centres on whether players in Ontario may participate in games with people outside Canada while the province continues to conduct and manage its regulated gambling scheme. The court heard the appeal on 7 October and reserved judgment.
Atlantic Lottery, British Columbia Lottery Corporation, Manitoba Liquor and Lotteries Corporation and Loto-Québec are appellants. They argue that Ontario’s proposed sharing of player pools, known as pooled liquidity, goes beyond the Criminal Code provision allowing a province to conduct and manage a lottery scheme “in that province.”
They also contend that international gambling operators already use their Ontario presence to direct people elsewhere in Canada to sites outside those provinces’ regulated systems. Those claims are contested submissions in the case.
Ontario maintains that it would oversee the games offered to players in Ontario, while international sites would remain subject to their own jurisdictions. Under the proposed model, players elsewhere in Canada would be excluded unless their province agreed to participate.
Ontario says a larger player pool would make games dependent on competing participants more viable.
A majority of Ontario’s Court of Appeal found the proposed model permissible in 2025, but one judge dissented.
The Supreme Court must now decide how the Criminal Code’s territorial wording applies to the proposed arrangement. Its ruling could determine whether Ontario can proceed with international pooling.
Ontario’s existing regulated online market recorded CA$396.3m ($281m) in August 2026 gaming revenue, down 4% from July but up 18% year on year. Peer-to-peer poker contributed CA$5.6m.
A separate Ipsos study commissioned by iGaming Ontario and the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario put the province’s regulated online gambling channelisation rate at 91.1% in 2026, up from 83.7% a year earlier.
The lottery corporations say their existing agreements to pool players across provinces already help games such as poker reach a viable number of participants
