I think that started when I was going through old newspaper archives. One of my central resources for the story was looking for statistics, key dates, who were the players, and using that as the launchpad to find other resources to build out my investigation into the economic and social effects of the casinos in Nova Scotia.

I was using a database of Atlantic Canadian newspapers. It was certainly clear that some of the same issues that were happening in Nova Scotia were also happening elsewhere, but one of the biggest for me was the suicides.

Gambling-related suicides started to pop up quite frequently in my research during the first few years after casinos and video lottery terminals were established in the country.

I found it strange that that topic was not in the public consciousness in Canada, and I wasn't seeing a lot of recent stories about it. It struck me as interesting that in 2003, it was deemed to be such a crisis that coroners and medical examiners said, "We're going to change the way we track this information."

I thought to myself there should be about two decades of very clear, well-tracked information. And there wasn't.

There was also contemporary evidence from news reports that suggested that, even within the first few years, some of that ambition to keep better track and to understand these deaths better just never happened. I also found it very moving on a personal level because the stories were really tragic, and they were so clearly associated with that expansion of gambling. I think it's safe to say that for most people who have died from a gambling-related suicide, they would not have necessarily found their way to gambling if it wasn't so conveniently offered to them.

Probably the biggest misunderstanding is that people don't necessarily consider that when the government takes an ownership role and a leadership role as a gambling operator, they are also the ones who are responsible for potentially impacted areas like public healthcare, addiction services and emergency room funding.

They're also the ones who may potentially have to deal with other spillovers related to everything from crime to family breakdown to bankruptcies.

It's challenging because we don't have a clear way of ascribing some of these costs and consequences of the gambling industry in a clear and direct financial way.

People also forget about the role of multiplier effects. When I spoke with a tourism industry executive in Nova Scotia, she talked about how, in the tourism industry, a dollar can turn into multiple dollars because there's a multiplier effect when you're spending at local businesses that develops the local economy. But money that is bet through legalized gambling is not going back to the economy in the same way. There is a lack of productivity and economic spinoff that you might see if that spending was deployed differently.

The new push for iGaming industries is often based on converting people gambling in grey markets and black markets. A grey market site is unregulated, while a black market site is unregulated but also criminally associated. The whole idea is if people are doing that, moving players over to the provincially regulated market allows governments to enforce a level of player protections, but more critically for them, they also keep part of the revenues.

The challenge with that is that you're never going to get 100 per cent of those players to move. Some of those people are going to be money laundering, or are going to be youth who are under the age of majority.

There's a lot of discussion based around the "channelization" of players from unregulated to regulated sites. The numbers are really big, but I've noticed that the figures which project how many people are gambling in non-regulated markets vary depending on whether it's a provincial agency, an academic researcher or a gambling consulting company calculating them. I've seen very, very different numbers, which says to me that nobody clearly understands the size of the problem.

We also don't factor for multiple accounts. Traditionally, if you have a government-owned online casino, you're allowed one account. But when you go and open accounts in an iGaming market like Ontario, you could open 20 or 30 different accounts.

In turn, the channelization rate is arguably a lot lower than people expect when these issues are considered.

Some industry analysts are of the opinion that there's a few companies that really dominate the market, for example FanDuel and DraftKings, with market shares so large that they create a misperception. It looks like there's a wide market, but so few companies are dominant that others aren't necessarily going to have a viable business. You have seen iGaming companies in Ontario already shut down and pull out of the market.

To me, the big question is: what is the market share? New York State, for example, offers weekly and monthly financial reports for each regulated sports betting company which help us understand statistics on market share. That was featured in a Globe and Mail commentary once, which noted that Ontarians had less understanding of this area than their American neighbours.

I think that's a question that should really be asked, because there's a contingent of the population who is going to say personal choice is important and having as many options as possible is important. But there's also a point at which there's diminishing returns.

Maybe having a dozen iGaming operators in Ontario instead of nearly 50 would provide a sufficient amount of choice and opportunities for people to play in that market. It also might reduce that glut of advertising that we see.

One researcher told me that he's of the opinion that sometimes companies enter iGaming markets with the expectation of making money and getting out. If they have to break some rules to do that, or pay some fines along the way, that's okay.

I think that's something worth considering. When you have that huge market and you have all these operators, surely there's going to be some who, in that quest to attract customers, are willing to, if not play a bit loosely with the rules, perhaps just take the financial penalty to avoid them if at all possible.

I think it's really important to think about the portion of Canada that lives in rural settings. I once spoke with a gambler in recovery who said she used to physically have to take a ferry to a casino because she lived on an island. This created friction each time she wanted to gamble. Now, a gambler can take out their cell phone any time of day and play.

What we maybe forget is that the ability to play was always tempered with certain frictions. VLTs don’t operate 24 hours a day. There are betting limits on them in Atlantic Canada, whereas you can go on Atlantic Lotto’s regulated online gambling site and play 24 hours a day. You could bet, in some cases, hundreds of times as much on these online slots.

We're in an age where it's convenient to have everything in the palm of your hand, but there was a certain protection in having gambling in physical spaces with certain regulations around them. We're losing that in this new wave of legalized gambling.

It's also worth noting that, especially in iGaming provinces like Ontario and Alberta, partner sites are run by independent operators. They have a different focus than a government does. They have different relationships with profit and shareholders, and those factors into their decisions.

I once heard an employee who worked for one of the bigger casino companies in the U.S. say that no company is ever going to do more than the bare minimum of player protection set out by a government because there's no financial incentive. If they add frictions that their competitors don't have, that puts them on the losing side of a business equation.

Realistically, when a government decides to expand gambling and to invite in private enterprise, they need to consider this fact when building policies. So far in Ontario and Alberta, those have not been central to the discussion.

First, I'll talk about the UK and gambling-related suicides. Those have really been brought to the forefront by families who have lost loved ones to suicides where gambling was a risk factor. There have been several inquests in the last few years in the UK into gambling-related suicides. The inquest process is when you investigate a death to learn more about the factors surrounding it and try to figure out if there are ways to protect the wider public and prevent future deaths. In some cases, those have led to asking companies: what can you do to improve player protections in light of what we're seeing?

The UK government now has a formal estimate of how many residents die by a gambling-related suicide. That's a conversation we could have in Canada, but what that requires is coroners and medical examiners asking more questions to make sure it's recognized if a death is gambling-related. It also requires families to advocate for that. I don't think families should have to be the ones pushing for it, but when we take a less stigmatizing approach to gambling and make it a more open conversation, that allows people who've been impacted, whether individually or as an affected other, to speak out about their experience.

If you look at Australia, one of the most notable things is they have considerable research. My reporting often comes back to Australian researchers and Australian studies. We have some great academic researchers here who are looking into gambling-related harms, but the area is not as well funded or as capitalized upon. As we move forward in this gambling era, we need to fund research to make sure we understand how it is affecting Canadians.

Finally, there are countries where they have data vaults, almost like a cloud program, where a provincial gaming corporation can view anonymous player data and analyze it. Regulators use data vaults to look at everything from suspicious transactions that might indicate money laundering to play patterns which might indicate that a bettor is wagering in a harmful way and might need a level of intervention.

I think it comes back to being a realist. If you look at the history of gambling expansion in this country, we have been asking the same sorts of questions, and replying with the same answers: it will create jobs, it will create tourists, it will do X, Y and Z.

When I say that I'm a realist, what I mean is I think it would be very easy to say, "Let's scrap iGaming. Let's cut that down to five companies." But where's the incentive for the government, which is bringing in revenue, to do that? Where is the incentive for the corporations who are making money? Where is the incentive for the swath of people who are going to say, "Well, that affects personal choice?"

Putting the genie back in the bottle is not going to happen. The real question, in my opinion, is what are we going to do moving forward?

Take Alberta. Maybe instead of bringing on as many iGaming partners as Ontario, they can have a moment of clarity and say, "This maybe doesn't make sense with the size of population we have, with the potential for harm."

You have provinces like Quebec and British Columbia where there has been some lobbying for these new iGaming industries. But let's say that's the way things go eventually. I think the question is: how do we right-size it? How do we make sure that it's an industry where there's data vaults, and we have certain frictions or betting limits, et cetera?

To me, that's where the changes have to happen. There's this challenge where some people think that to solve gambling harms, you need to get rid of the baby with the bathwater and extinguish the industry from existence.

As someone who's spoken with people who have lost loved ones to gambling-related suicides, even they have not necessarily called for a wholesale dismantling of the gambling industry. What they have expressed interest in are reforms to make sure that people who are adversely harmed by the industry can avoid the worst consequences of addiction, like suicide.

My reporting led the Newfoundland and Labrador Medical Examiner’s office to finally start tracking gambling as a suicide risk factor, and their office had been created in 1996. I'm going to get that first batch of data 30 years after that major reform for their office and 23 years after there was supposedly a national reckoning that led to better tracking.

Change is slow. It requires taking incremental steps. That's really where we need to focus. Small changes over time are going to make the real difference.