Inside iGO’s Regulatory Evolution with Mitch Davidson

When Martha Otton announced in the summer of 2024 that she was retiring as Executive Director of iGaming Ontario, there was thinking among different sectors of the province’s regulated igaming market that the organization’s Chief of Staff, Mitch Davidson, would be a great fit to move into the leadership role.

Instead, Davidson decided in August to get back into the policy game, this time as Vice President, Policy for Canadian public affairs firm Enterprise Canada. The former Director of Policy for the Premier’s Office was our guest on the latest episode of the Gaming News Canada Show presented by Bede Gaming.

Your humble host tried to cover with the new father the gamut of topics in the business of sports betting and online gaming, Canadian style, including:

• Davidson’s decision, after speaking with some gaming-related businesses, to join Enterprise;
• The work done at iGO under the leadership of Otton and him to launch Ontario’s open private-sector market in April 2022, and the success story that is the Ontario model;
• Why the implementation of a centralized self-exclusion program, identified as a priority by operators, has taken so long (new iGO president and CEO Joseph Hiller told us on the GNCS at the beginning of the month he expects the program to be launched in the first half of 2026);
• Other priorities for iGO moving forward;
• His reaction to last week’s decision by the Court of Appeal for Ontario to go along with reviving pay-to-play daily fantasy contests and expanding online poker games (Davidson writes about the court ruling and liquidity in his latest post on The Policy Shop);
• What happens with regulated gaming beyond Ontario, including Alberta.

Davidson also explained the motivation for the creation of The Policy Shop on Substack, a weekly, well-reasoned deep dive into the issues that matter most to Canadians these days and – importantly - offering potential solutions.

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