Creating a regulated online gaming market that draws players out of the shadows while still allowing private operators to compete has become Ontario’s central gamble on iGaming. The province’s decision to launch a competitive online market in April 2022 marked a significant shift from the long-standing model of a single government platform, creating initial optimism about boosting capital market activity and consumer engagement, even as observers warned that growth would likely be gradual and regulatory-heavy. That cautious outlook proved accurate in the early months, when the market was described as off to a slow start but with significant long-term potential.
For Joseph Hillier, now president and CEO of iGaming Ontario, that gamble reflects years of watching a widening gap between unregulated play and public expectations on consumer protection and accountability. Ontario’s decision to open the market while insisting on tight safeguards is testing how far a province can push innovation within the Criminal Code regime that still treats gaming as a controlled activity rather than a normal consumer product. His appointment to lead the agency followed a period in which iGaming Ontario’s leadership and mandate were sharpened to balance revenue growth with consumer protection and market integrity.
Hillier did not start his career at a regulator. After studying law at McGill, he joined Ogilvy Renault, later Norton Rose, in private practice, working mainly in the corporate and securities space, and then moved in-house to RBC’s public companies group, doing similar work before spending several more years on corporate disclosure and governance matters and working closely with the corporate secretary and board. That experience, he says, showed him that compliance only works when rules are understood as part of how a business succeeds, not as an external nuisance.
The shift occurred when he left RBC to join the Ontario Attorney General’s office after the 2018 election, a one-year leave that evolved into senior political roles and ultimately led to his appointment as chief of staff for Attorney General Doug Downey. He was involved in the iGaming file from the beginning of his time in the Attorney General’s office through to his departure, including policy development and planning for the market. Public sector work, he argues, should be on more lawyers’ radar. “It can be incredibly rewarding,” he says, adding that “anyone who’s thinking about it, I strongly encourage them to consider at least a stint in the public sector because the skill sets that you’re able to bring back to your next role are truly invaluable.” From there, he became chief strategy officer at the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario, with responsibilities including policy, strategic planning, corporate governance and government relations.
When iGaming Ontario was created, and the province launched its online market in April 2022, the file had come full circle from the early policy discussions that first crossed his desk in 2018. Moving into the CEO role feels like “a bit of a full circle moment,” he says, because it lets him bring together his experience in private practice, at a major financial institution and inside government to guide a sector that now carries both material revenue expectations and real regulatory risk. His priority is to move the agency beyond what he calls a startup mindset and establish it on two pillars: commercial performance and player protection.
That dual focus reflects the evolution of the market. Following the initial tentative phase, Ontario’s iGaming sector has become one of the most active regulated online gambling markets, with billions in monthly wagers and consistently rising gross gaming revenue. Analysts now point to Ontario’s record-setting handle and rapid growth in online wagers, arguing that the framework has helped shift a large share of play from offshore and grey-market sites into a regulated, tax-paying environment that provides consumer protection and responsible-gambling support, which is not available in the unregulated space.
On the commercial side, Hillier wants operators to see iGaming Ontario “more as a business partner rather than just a government agency,” and he is pressing the organization to understand what operators need to innovate and compete while staying inside the rules. This includes drawing on external analysis that highlights the strength of casino products within Ontario’s iGaming mix and the market’s appeal to international brands seeking a tightly regulated but lucrative jurisdiction. On the player side, he is clear that the regulated market will only pull traffic away from offshore sites if it offers visible protections and confidence. His goal, he says, is to make sure players “have the necessary supports and infrastructure around their gameplay so that they can play with confidence in the market.”
That strategy was shaped by a blunt reality. Before April 2022, the only regulated online option in Ontario was OLG’s platform, while a “pretty significant piece of the online gaming market” sat in unregulated or illicit channels, Hillier says. Opening the market to multiple private operators was designed to create “a safe, regulated space for players that emphasized competition and consumer choice” while generating a dividend for the province, helping to pull gambling activity and related revenues back onshore.
Responsible gaming is the other half of that bet. Hillier calls it “one of the most critical components to the success of this market,” pointing to requirements that operators complete RG Check, developed by the Responsible Gambling Council, and maintain robust programs and systems to support players. Currently, each regulated operator maintains its own self-exclusion program, which allows individuals to register and temporarily step away from gaming. A centralized system, currently under development, is designed to make a single registration apply across the entire regulated iGaming marketplace, including OLG’s online platform. Commentators on Canada’s regulated iGaming sector have argued that embedding responsible-gambling infrastructure and education into the business model from the outset is what sets these markets apart and positions them as examples for other jurisdictions. The signal to players is that regulated operators offer concrete protections that offshore sites do not. Having “healthy players is going to mean healthy markets because it’s going to mean sustainable play and sustainable success,” he says.
Anti-money laundering pressure has prompted iGaming Ontario to further expand into the technology sector. As the AML reporting entity for all its private operators, it aggregates and analyzes operator data and files the prescribed transaction reports with Fintrac for the entire market, and must maintain what Hillier describes as “a quite robust system for monitoring and reporting.” Developments in other provinces have underscored the stakes: British Columbia, for example, is overhauling its gambling regulations with the primary aim of cracking down on money laundering after an AML penalty against its lottery corporation prompted a broader look at how online and land-based gambling are monitored. Hillier sees an opportunity to automate and streamline Ontario’s AML processes in ways that protect integrity while reducing reporting burden, and the agency is working with external technology partners to build that capability as part of a broader push to be “technology forward.” As part of the larger technology modernization project, he is also exploring how artificial intelligence could eventually help iGaming Ontario sift, sort, screen, and filter the large volumes of data it receives from operators, even as the province layers what he calls "belts and suspenders" controls around AI in the public sector.
Partnership also shapes the agency’s core compliance strategy. Rather than standing back as a distant enforcer, Hillier has been meeting directly with all 50 operators in the market to build relationships that make escalation easier when something goes wrong. “It really comes down to the trust and the relationship between us and the operator,” he says, and he is clear that operators must feel comfortable bringing forward concerns so everyone can “get together and come to a point of compliance” within the framework of their operating agreements. That collaborative posture aligns with early assessments of Ontario’s framework that described the regime as conservative in its enforcement rhetoric but open to working with operators to manage novel risks in a new market, even as the AGCO retains exclusive responsibility for overseeing compliance with the broader regulatory framework.
For law firms and in-house teams, the result is a rising wave of new questions on issues that did not exist when gaming meant physical casinos and government lotteries. Hillier points to developments such as the Ontario Court of Appeal reference on international liquidity, which examines pooled play models that allow players in different jurisdictions to participate in common peer-to-peer games, and to the emergence of cryptocurrencies as a gaming and payments tool in other jurisdictions outside Canada. Legal advisers are also watching how other provinces respond. Alberta, in particular, is using Ontario’s multibillion-dollar iGaming market as a reference point as it prepares for the 2026 launch of its own regulated regime, examining how an open-market model, responsible-gambling tools, and private operators have been structured in Ontario and how effectively that model draws players away from grey-market sites.
That national lens is now increasingly echoed in industry and international commentary, which presents Ontario’s regulated model and its revenue profile as an example of how to bring offshore play into domestic, taxed and supervised channels while keeping player protection at the forefront. It is, Hillier says, “a really exciting time for some of those interesting innovations,” particularly as digital commerce enables markets to be more cross-jurisdictional and incentivizes regulators, operators and their advisers to develop legal tools that can keep pace.
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