Canada needs to legalize single-game sports betting ASAP, according to the major leagues that previously declared betting to be a threat to the nation’s “moral status.”
This week, the commissioners of the National Basketball Association, National Hockey League, Major League Baseball, Major League Soccer and Canadian Football League issued a joint statement urging “prompt action” by Canada’s federal government to pass legislation that would “authorize provinces to offer betting on single sporting events.”
Canada’s provincial gambling monopolies already have sports betting, albeit limited to parlays requiring wagers on a minimum of three events. That restriction means most Canadian bettors tend to patronize internationally licensed online sportsbooks that allow an infinitely more favorable betting environment.
The commissioners note that sports betting is already happening in Canada, which they claim is illegal. That’s not technically accurate, as the single-game prohibition applies only to the provincial monopolies and private bookmakers who (foolishly) choose to base their operational infrastructure and/or ‘mind and management’ within Canada’s borders.
More to the point, the commissioners claim that a homegrown single-game betting market “would be beneficial to sports and their fans,” with the word ‘sports’ standing in for the cash-hungry leagues these commissioners represent.
These same leagues have been among the most strident in pressing US states to cut them in for a slice of the proceeds when crafting betting legislation, whether through ‘integrity’ fees or mandatory use of league-supplied data for in-play wagering.
It’s worth remembering that some of these very same leagues vehemently opposed Canada’s early efforts to approve single-game wagering. In 2012, MLB reps claimed that legalizing single-game betting would mean the game’s “integrity would be open to question, play by play, day after day.”
That same year, the NHL warned that “the very nature of sports in North America will change, and we fear it will be changed for the worse” if the government approved single-game betting.
The NHL was still opposing legal betting in 2015, the year the NBA abruptly dropped its opposition, in lockstep with its new commissioner Adam Silver’s epiphany over how much cash the league might collect from a slice of legal betting.
So why have the leagues that operate in Canada gone public now with their support for legal betting? Because parliament is set to adjourn for the summer on June 17 without passing the latest single-game betting bill put forward by MPs with major casinos in their ridings.
New Democratic Party MP Brian Masse told the Windsor Star that the leagues’ support was “a vindication of what needed to be done a decade ago,” while claiming that this Avaricious Avengers Assemble moment “shouldn’t go unnoticed by the prime minister.”
Except it almost certainly will, as the government currently has its hands full with more pressing matters, such as the single biggest public health crisis in a century and an imploding economy that won’t be rescued by the pennies that taxing betting revenue will produce. Nice try, though.
