Online gambling choice may be coming to Canada’s largest province while the push for national single-event sports betting gets new life.

Thursday saw Ontario’s Conservative government deliver its 2020-21 budget, which revealed the drastic toll the pandemic has taken on the Ontario Lottery & Gaming Corp (OLG) monopoly. After delivering C$2.3b (US$1.76b) to provincial coffers in fiscal 2019-20, OLG’s 2020-21 forecast is a mere C$200m.

Ontario’s land-based casinos, which are owned by OLG while private operators handle day-to-day management, were shut down this spring due to COVID-19 and only recently began to resume operations under severe health & safety restrictions. OLG’s finances were sufficiently dire to require a C$500m lifeline from the province to keep its lights on.  

OLG is overdue in releasing its 2019-20 annual report, so we don’t yet know what kind of boost its PlayOLG online gambling site received from the land-based shutdown. The 2018-19 annual report showed the site generated revenue of C$92m, which was around one-quarter better than the year before, but still well behind rivals in British Columbia and Quebec.