Interview With Nikolina Jerić: Why Ontario’s Online Casino Market Is Unlike Any Other in Canada, Canada Reviews

Nikolina Jerić has reviewed online casinos across Canada, the United States, and several European markets. What she finds when she compares them isn’t always what players expect. And Ontario, as it turns out, occupies an unusual position that most Canadians don’t fully appreciate until they look at what players elsewhere are dealing with.

An iGaming writer and expert contributor at Casino.ca, Canada’s independent online casino review and comparison platform, Nikolina has spent more than five years testing operators, reading the fine print most players skip, and writing for a Canadian audience that deserves better than vague recommendations. We asked her to put Ontario in context: what players here have that others don’t, where the market still has catching up to do, and what she’d tell a friend before they played anywhere.

You spend a lot of time comparing markets. What’s the first thing that stands out when you look at Ontario versus what’s happening in other provinces?

The gap is bigger than most people in Ontario realize. Outside of BC, Manitoba, and Quebec, which all have their own provincially operated platforms, most Canadian players have no regulated options at all. Alberta has nothing. Most Atlantic provinces have very limited coverage. Those players end up on offshore sites because there’s nothing else, and offshore sites can look perfectly professional while offering zero consumer protection. When I look at Ontario, what stands out is that it’s the only province in the country where a private operator has to earn a Canadian licence before they can take your money. That’s not a small thing.

How does it feel different as a player, in practice?

The things that feel like basic table stakes in Ontario don’t exist elsewhere. Deposit limits you can set and trust to hold. Self-exclusion tools that work across registered operators. Bonus offers that have to be explained clearly before you claim them, not buried in terms you’d need a lawyer to parse. And if something goes wrong, you can take it to a regulator. That last one sounds obvious until you realize that most Canadian players outside Ontario have no version of it. Your only option if an offshore site freezes your account is to post about it on a forum and hope someone cares.

A lot of Canadians travel to or follow what’s happening in US casino markets. How does Ontario compare?

It’s a closer comparison than most people expect. Some US states (New Jersey was first, then Pennsylvania, Michigan) legalized online casino gambling at the state level, and their frameworks look a lot like Ontario’s on paper. What I find interesting when I compare them is that the US markets have had longer to mature. New Jersey launched in 2013. Ontario launched in 2022. The US states have had almost a decade to figure out what works, and you can see it in things like game variety and how operators handle promotions.

Where Ontario has a real edge is payment options. Interac doesn’t exist in the US. American players are using credit cards, wire transfers, or cryptocurrency for a lot of deposits, which adds friction and can get complicated. In Ontario, a deposit is basically the same process as transferring money to anyone else. That convenience matters a lot, especially if you’re a frequent depositor.

What is Ontario can improve, in your view?

The advertising rules create a strange situation. Registered Ontario operators can’t advertise bonus offers publicly; they can only promote to their own existing players or people who’ve specifically opted in. That protects players from the kind of predatory “$1000 free” campaigns that US players see everywhere. But it also means that when Ontarians search for a casino, the first results they find are often grey-market sites that can say whatever they want. The regulated options are quieter by law. It’s a protection that inadvertently pushes some players toward the sites it was designed to steer them away from.

For someone in Ontario who wants to play it safe: what do you actually tell them?

Check the iGaming Ontario registration list before you sign up anywhere. It’s public, it’s easy to find, and it takes thirty seconds. If a site isn’t on it, you’re outside the regulated framework, whatever the site’s homepage says about it. Casino.ca reviews the casinos online in Ontario that are on that list, so it’s a reasonable place to start if you don’t want to do the research yourself. But honestly, that one check eliminates most of the risk.

If you were explaining Ontario’s market to someone who plays online occasionally in another province — someone visiting, or thinking about moving here — what would you want them to know?

That they’ve probably been taking on more risk than they knew. Playing on unlicensed websites is always unsafe, but some run fine for years without incident. But you find out what the protection is worth the moment something goes wrong. I’ve spoken with players who had straightforward disputes with unregulated operators and had nowhere to go. No regulator, no ombudsman, nothing. Ontario isn’t a perfect market. But it’s one where the system is at least designed to work in the player’s favour when it matters. That’s rarer than it sounds.