The potential impact of sports betting ads on children and youth really hit home for Ottawa pediatrician Dr. Shawn Kelly during a conversation with his seven-year-old son. Read MoreDr. Shawn Kelly fully grasped the problem when his young child talked about sports betting terms while he was just learning about hockey.
Dr. Shawn Kelly fully grasped the problem when his young child talked about sports betting terms while he was just learning about hockey.
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The potential impact of sports betting ads on children and youth really hit home for Ottawa pediatrician Dr. Shawn Kelly during a conversation with his seven-year-old son.
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His son, a hockey fan, was just learning about the game. He asked his father what the difference was between plus-minus, a hockey stat for goals, and over-under, a gambling term often used in sports betting.
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“It was at that moment I realized that his exposure to hockey and learning the game was so tied in and indistinguishable from the advertising for iGaming (gambling) that he was conflating the two in his mind.”
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The Evening Citizen
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Since the federal government lifted its ban on single-game sports betting in Canada in 2021 and Ontario legalized online gambling, ads for sports betting have flooded sports broadcasting, leading to calls for tighter regulations. Children are among the consumers of those ads.
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Kelly, who is both a pediatrician and an addictions medicine specialist, is worried about what’s may come if ads for sports betting continue to be so closely linked to sports broadcasts that children and adolescents watch. Studies from around the world have linked problem gambling with increased risk of suicide.
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“To me, it is terrifying. I don’t think of myself as a fretting, terrified person – I tend to work in the trenches – but this scares me,” he said.
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Kelly, along with Dr. Shannon Charlebois, medical editor of the CMAJ, is co-author of a recently published editorial in the Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ) that warns of potential harms to children from sports betting ads, despite age restrictions on gambling. It calls on the federal government to enact “strong, effective” legislation to protect youth from gambling advertising.
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That includes expediting Bill S-211, a Senate bill that provides for the development of a national framework to regulate sports betting advertising and to set national standards to prevent negative risks from the advertising.
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Even before single-game sports betting was legalized, a 2019 survey of Canadian students in grades 7-12 found that about four per cent expressed an urge to gamble and two per cent had symptoms of gambling addiction, wrote the authors of the editorial.
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