Fri, November 14, 2025
Canadian Olympic and Paralympic Committees are calling for sport betting tax revenue to be reinvested into elite sport
The Canadian Olympic Committee (COC) CEO David Shoemaker and Canadian Paralympic Committee (CPC) CEO Karen O’Neill are calling for sport betting tax revenue to be reinvested into elite sport. The Committees are calling on the federal government to ensure that a fraction of the betting revenue is reinvested into high level sport due to Canada’s ongoing funding crisis which is causing the loss of sporting talent within the nation.
As shared in February 2025, according to CBC, Canada's Olympic sports are facing a funding crisis, with an expected $329 million deficit expected over the next five years. The last increase in core federal funding, which Freestyle Canada's Chief Executive Officer Peter Judge called the “blood in the veins” of his organisation, for Canada's 62 summer and winter National Sport Organisations (NSO) was all the way back in 2005.
During the beginning of the year, Shoemaker suggested that the government could direct more sports-betting revenue to NSO. A Deloitte report released in 2024 stated that the second year of regulated gambling in Ontario alone produced $380 million in federal government revenue.
Single-event sports betting was legalised in 2021 in Canada. In their proposal to the federal government, the CEOs estimated that around CA$65 million is received annually by the federal government via online sports betting and that figure is allegedly expected to rise to CA$100 million by 2029.
“That tax revenue could more than cover what we need as a contribution to the national sports system,” Shoemaker stated, and there is now increasing pressure to make this a reality. Certain NSOs are expecting funding cuts as high as 30% in 2026 if betting revenue is not used to fund elite sport, according to Tribuna.com.
Despite this, Prime Minister Mark Carney’s most recent budget did not increase NSO funding. In 2024, the budget only allocated CA$41 million in short-term funding across 2 years to NSO, much to the COC and CPC’s disapproval.
There is a stark difference in other countries. In Norway, “64% of all gambling and betting revenues, roughly CA$206 million annually, is channelled directly into sport, funding infrastructure, coaching and grassroots development,” according to Inside the Games.
The CEOs also stated in their proposal to the government that “83% of Canadians support the reinvestment of these funds into sport.”
The full proposal can be found here.
