Regulate This Filth: How Sports Betting Ads Are Grooming Our Kids for a Lifetime of Addiction

Turn on a hockey game. Watch a sports highlight show. Scroll through social media. You can't escape it. A relentless, inescapable tidal wave of sports betting advertising has flooded our country, and it's turning our national pastimes into a 24/7 casino. With slick production, celebrity endorsements, and promises of "risk-free" bets, these companies are engaged in a predatory campaign to hook a new generation on gambling, and our government is letting it happen.

This isn't harmless fun. It's the new payday loan crisis, wrapped in the flag of sports fandom. Advocacy groups are sounding the alarm, warning that this constant exposure is normalizing gambling for children and creating a public health crisis in the making. The ads are designed to be irresistible, using every psychological trick in the book to downplay the risks and sell the illusion of easy money. We are grooming our kids to see every goal, every pitch, and every play not as a moment of athletic achievement, but as a betting proposition.

Provinces like Ontario have made feeble attempts at regulation, but the ads continue to pour across provincial borders on national broadcasts. The industry claims it can regulate itself, a laughable assertion from an industry whose entire business model depends on people losing money. The Canadian Senate is finally making noise about a national framework, but the time for talk is over. We need a full-scale crackdown. We need to treat this addictive product with the same severity as tobacco and alcohol and get this filth out of our kids' faces before an entire generation's financial future is gambled away.