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SportsTranscript
00:00All right, let's go now to our friends in the North in Canada and talk about sports betting in Alberta.
00:04There was some discussion, I know, Pat, at the end of last year that they were going to try to get sports betting off the ground in 2024.
00:10They did not, and certainly now I think we're probably waiting to next year.
00:14But there definitely seems to be some optimism that that could be in the future.
00:19Yeah, it's really interesting because, yeah, last year at the Canadian Gaming Summit, the Minister of Red Tape Reduction, Dale McNally, up there said,
00:29yeah, we're going to launch commercial sports betting in Alberta.
00:33So, OK, that's great. We're going to try to get it off the ground by the end of 2024.
00:37OK, that's great. But then by the time GTUE rolled around in the fall in Las Vegas,
00:43we heard multiple people say, nope, this isn't going to happen. It's going to be pushed back into 2025.
00:48And now we've got finally have a bill introduced by Nally in the legislature that should set up the framework.
00:56Now, a lot of it is blank at the moment. You know, there's no tax rate. There's no number of licenses.
01:01There's no there's just a lot of questions left in the legislation that'll get worked out.
01:07We're sure. And but, you know, we've got multiple people saying, hey, maybe it'll still be in time for the late 2025.
01:13But then you've got some people saying 2026. So that's a long time from now.
01:18Basically, though, we do know it'll look a lot like Ontario, which is a wide open market.
01:23It's online casino. It's online sports betting. There's some in-person sports books, which I'm sure Alberta has quite a few casinos.
01:29So I'm sure in person will be up there as well. But, yeah, just a lot of questions remaining, including that timeline.
01:37It does seem like it's coming again, very much like Ontario, which is a massive market.
01:42There's more than 40 online gambling operators up there in there.
01:46You know, they started off slow, but they've grown pretty nicely over the last two years of having legalized open casinos.
01:54Of course, there are lottery operators in the other provinces that do allow for online gambling since 2021,
02:01when the parlay sports betting was phased fully or I guess it was allowed to do a single game event wagering.
02:11So anyway, Alberta coming along, they'll get there eventually, just a lot slower than they initially promised.