What Responsible Gambling Looks Like in Ontario’s Modern Online Casinos

By Frederik Delorme

February 20th, 2026

BURLINGTON, ON

Responsible gambling is a key part of Ontario’s licensed gambling sector. There are many different tools used to encourage players to stay safe when playing.

Sports betting to casinos, the sector is a huge revenue driver.

From 2024 to 2025, Ontario’s gambling sector managed to make CA$3.20 billion in revenue. From sports betting to casinos, the sector is a huge revenue driver. Yet for the average player, gambling can present some problems, especially when it stops becoming entertainment and becomes a necessity.

Fairness and Transparency

If a casino game was cheating you, would you even know? Most online casino games, excluding live casino titles, which use chance, are determined by random number generators. Science and technology have a long history of making these as fair and random as possible. Yet if a game didn’t have one in place, how could you even tell?

RTP is expressed as a percentage. It represents the amount you can expect to see returned should you play for a sustained period of time.

The truth is, many people wouldn’t. That is why Ontario’s modern online casinos have transparency at their heart. They encourage games that have plenty of documentation, telling people how to play, what bonuses are on offer and their chance of winning. This is usually given as a return to player (RTP) rating.

RTP is expressed as a percentage. It represents the amount you can expect to see returned should you play for a sustained period of time. Imagine a game has an RTP of 96%. You wager $100 over a period of time in $1 bets. You can expect to see around $96 returned to you, with the rest going to the house.

Stick to Licensed Websites

When websites are licensed with an agreement with iGaming Ontario, they abide by the rules and regulations of safer gambling. If not, then their licenses are revoked, or they face heavy fines. Thus, it is not in their interest to exploit gamblers. This is in contrast to some offshore casinos.

You can find many of the best online casinos in Canada at GlobalNews report. Here you will also see sites ranked by other factors like payment methods, bonuses and fair play. Using third-party reviews makes it easier to see which casinos are licensed, trusted, and transparent.

Preventing Underage Participation

One of the key factors in safer gambling is getting underage players away from operations. In Ontario, for casino games, the legal betting age is 19. When people log onto casinos licensed in the province, age verification should be a given. However, if people access offshore casinos, this is not always the case. For online casinos, checking the age of players involves using rigorous verification checks. Customers must be able to provide the necessary personal information and ID for age verification.

Figures for how many young people gamble differ by province. For example, estimates are that 34% of young people in British Columbia have engaged in some form of gambling in the last 12 months. Surveys conducted in Toronto have suggested that between 50 to 70% of young people below the age of 18 gamble for money at least once a year.

Self-Exclusion Tools

A self-exclusion tool is a database that gamblers can choose to register themselves with. This provides their information to licensed online casinos. When they try to log on or sign up, the database is cross-referenced. If they are on it, they are unable to access services. People can do this for as long as they wish if they feel gambling is becoming a problem for them.

In Ontario, this is known as My Play Break. It is entered voluntarily, and you can set the amount of time you want to be excluded from online casinos. It is entirely confidential, and no one will know you have registered on it. However, it can not bar you from offshore casinos, so you must seek further assistance for this or make sure you do not have the means to visit them.

Monitoring Your Own Gambling

While these initiatives are all helpful, they are no substitute for monitoring your own gambling. By doing so, you can spot the signs when it is becoming a problem, and hopefully deal with them before they do any harm.

Gambling sites should have several tools that help you monitor the time spent gambling. These may include limits for both time and the amounts you can deposit. By setting these, they will give you a check and prevent you from chasing losses. Playing more hours than usual, particularly at unsociable times, is a key sign of gambling addiction.

Players must take responsibility for themselves and educate themselves on the signs.

Another sign is if your gambling habits change. If you are someone who likes a few games of poker, then suddenly you find yourself splurging on slots or placing wagers on sports you have no interest in, you should be worried. Gambling has now turned from entertainment to an obsession.

Thus, responsible gambling is in the hands of many. Players must take responsibility for themselves and educate themselves on the signs. In turn, companies must help them to do this and provide a range of tools to deal with the issues. All of this creates a safer and fairer gambling environment.