The article Online Gaming is everywhere. Except Québec by Martin Patriquin, published in The Logic on March 30, takes the strange stance of unreservedly celebrating Quebec’s monopolistic approach to online gaming. It is the Quebec Online Gaming Coalition’s contention that the discussion around this important issue can benefit from adopting a more nuanced perspective.
With just a few months to go before the next Quebec election, we fully welcome having an open and transparent public debate about how Quebec should tackle this complex issue. Unfortunately, Loto-Québec seems more comfortable having this debate in a series of articles aimed at an English-speaking audience outside Quebec than it is in doing so in La belle province.
To elevate the quality of the debate and convey the sometimes complex dynamics of online gaming, the Quebec Online Gaming Coalition proposes exploring the following questions that Mr. Patriquin’s article conveniently set aside:
- Is it really possible to enforce Loto-Québec’s monopoly on the Internet? After 15 years of marketing its online gaming service on TV, in print and on the boards of every Canadiens hockey game, Loto-Québec has only managed to capture approximately 50% of the market, according to its CEO. Meanwhile, anyone with a cell phone can access over 2,000 online gambling sites without any oversight from the Quebec government or revenue going to provincial coffers.
- Is public health really better served by having only the state-owned lottery corporation (be it Loto-Québec or OLG) submit themselves to government-imposed rules or is it better to impose the same rules on all operators, whether private or public? While Quebec currently only imposes its rules on 50% of the market, Ontario now does it on 84% of its market. It would thus appear that Ontario players are now overall better protected against fraud and have more consistent safeguards available to them than Quebec players.
- If it’s so concerned about player safety, should Loto-Québec be paying $15 million per year to secure exclusive advertising rights in major media outlets? Or is it just acting like the unregulated monopoly that it is and simply trying to make the competition disappear? And if the word unregulated startles you, please note that, unlike in other provinces, there is no regulatory body in Quebec overseeing either Loto-Quebec’s advertising practices or its game offering.
Finally, it should be said that, contrary to the article’s claims, the idea of regulating private online gambling has been gaining traction in Quebec. In fact, that is probably why we are suddenly seeing so many articles like the one published on this site.
As recently as September 2025, no other than the Coalition Avenir Québec, the party of the current Minister of Finance, adopted a resolution to subject private operators to the same rules as Loto-Québec. And during the most recent budget debates in the National Assembly, opposition parties used nearly all their available time to question the Minister of Finance and the CEO of Loto-Québec about online gaming, highlighting the weaknesses of the current regulatory framework in the province.
Whether Loto-Quebec, Finance Minister Eric Girard or anyone else likes it, online gaming on private sites is a reality in Quebec and ignoring it won’t make it go away. The question is therefore not “if” but “how” to regulate private operators, and that is the debate that Quebecers must have.