Statutes & Regulation

This is the section that answers the first question anyone should ask about an online casino: who, legally, is allowed to run it, and who is watching. In Canada the answer is provincial rather than federal. The Criminal Code leaves the conduct and management of gambling to the provinces, and each province has made its own choice about what that looks like — which is why “licensed in Canada” is a phrase with no single meaning behind it.

Québec’s choice was a monopoly, not a market. Loto-Québec, a provincial Crown corporation, operates the province’s own online gambling platform, Espacejeux, which launched on 1 December 2010, and the Régie des alcools, des courses et des jeux (RACJ) is the regulator that licenses and oversees that activity. There is no Québec licence an ordinary commercial operator can apply for and advertise, which puts the province in a genuinely different position from Ontario, where a competitively licensed market operates under iGaming Ontario and the AGCO. Offshore operators serving Canadian players hold foreign licences instead — Malta, the UK, Curaçao — real authorisations, but issued elsewhere and enforced elsewhere.

Filings here set out those arrangements as published, with the qualifications left in. Nothing in this section rates or recommends an operator, and nothing here is legal advice: it is a description of the rules, and where a rule is unsettled or provincially specific, the filing says so plainly.