January 16, 2025
If anyone knows how far gambling law has come in Ontario, it’s Don Bourgeois.
Bourgeois had his first professional encounters with the practice area in the late 1980s as a lawyer with the Ministry of Consumer and Commercial Relations, a department with a particularly wide-ranging mandate.
“It was a womb-to-tomb kind of approach. We were responsible for vital statistics, funeral homes, real estate brokers, motor vehicles and so on. One area we handled was lottery schemes, which was the issuance of licenses to charities to manage bingos and raffles,” explains Bourgeois, co-program director for The Osgoode Certificate in Gambling Law program.
Within a few years, Premier Bob Rae’s government had authorized casinos in the province, kickstarting a transformation in gambling law in which Bourgeois played his own part during his tenure in a variety of senior public sector roles. By the time he left his position as general counsel of the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario in 2014, gaming was a multibillion-dollar industry in Ontario.
From his private-sector vantage point as principal of Gaming & Regulation Group Inc. and counsel to the gaming and gambling law practice group at Fogler, Rubinoff LLP, Bourgeois has remained deeply involved during the last decade as Ontario’s gaming market continued its rise to become one of the largest in the world.
“Ontario is a very significant player internationally,” he says. “It’s an extremely important – and heavily regulated – market.”
After its last run in 2018, Bourgeois and his co-program director Harley Redlick are bringing back Osgoode’s gambling law certificate with a fresh focus to reflect the continuing development of the industry, including the landmark launch in 2022 of iGaming Ontario, the AGCO subsidiary dedicated to the province’s online gaming, which now accounts for the bulk of the regulated market.
“Given the maturity of the market, people have a pretty good sense of the regulatory requirements. This program will of course help with that side, but we’re getting more into the business aspect more than we did before,” Bourgeois says. “Instead of being passive, we’re getting people to see the business opportunities there are here and how they need to change their activities to operate more efficiently, effectively and profitably in and across Canada.”
Over five days in April and May 2025, the comprehensive updated program will tackle a variety of topics facing domestic and international industry players, including compliance and risk mitigation, financing and M&A, as well as public policy issues such as anti-money laundering and responsible gambling. As a result, Bourgeois says it’s not just gaming lawyers and regulators who will benefit from attending.
“The idea is to have people from the supervisory level of management in the business, from the board of directors on down, including chief financial officers, chief operating officers and others who are involved in making and approving decisions,” he says.
The gambling law certificate program is not Bourgeois’ first association with Osgoode. When he first entered the doors of the law school more than four decades ago as an LLB student, it was only supposed to be the first stop on his way to a bigger goal:
“I planned to become prime minister, and thought being a lawyer was a good way to get started,” Bourgeois says.
Somewhere along the way, his priorities changed as Bourgeois found a level of fulfillment in legal practice that he was not expecting.
“The law degree turned out to be a great foundation for exploring issues around public policy, how we relate to each other, how society evolves and the role of government,” he says. “Those are topics that I find endlessly fascinating and the legal profession has been a really good entrance to participate in those kinds of activities over the course of my career.”
Although he retired from AGCO in 2014, Bourgeois never intended it to mark the end of his career in gambling law. At the time of his departure, he had just helped the agency overhaul its regulatory regime, implementing a more flexible risk-based approach under a modernized Gaming Control Act.
“It was a good time to go because there were a number of good people who had been trained up to take over. From a personal perspective, it was also a good time, because I was young enough to be able to continue to do interesting things in the market that was starting to develop,” he says. “Dealing with the regulations from the other side has been a different experience, and quite frankly a learning experience. It makes you think about the positions you took as a regulator and what you might have done differently.”
Want to learn more about The Osgoode Certificate in Gambling Law?
Don Bourgeois – Principal of Gaming & Regulation Group Inc. and counsel to the gaming and gambling law practice group at Fogler, Rubinoff LLP
Program Co-Director of The Osgoode Certificate in Gambling Law