Polymarket isn’t legal in Ontario. How did its flyers end up circulating at a Jays game?
A Blue Jays spokesperson said team management was unaware of the flyers
Polymarket remains banned in Ontario, but flyers soliciting customers to the controversial prediction market platform appear to have been distributed at the Rogers Centre recently.
According to the Globe and Mail, flyers advertising Polymarket as an “official partner” of the Major League Baseball (MLB) organization were handed out to fans during the Blue Jays’ home opener weekend. The flyer featured an illustration of a baseball player, and offered users $20 to gamble with if they signed up using a Blue Jays promotional code. (A Blue Jays spokesperson told Toronto Life that team management was unaware of the flyers.)
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In addition to the use of its services, advertising of Polymarket has also been banned since last year, when a settlement was reached with the Ontario Securities Commission that prohibited the company’s operations, including marketing.
Outside of Ontario, Polymarket was indeed named as the MLB’s official prediction market exchange partner last month.
Polymarket and the MLB did not respond to the Globe’s requests for comment, and the OSC said it could not elaborate on the matter. “While we cannot discuss what we do with the information we are provided, it is taken very seriously by the Commission,” spokesperson Debra Chan told the newspaper.
Questions regarding the source and legality of the flyers remain.
“That settlement seems to be quite clear that there’s a ban on promoting Polymarket in Ontario,” Jean-Paul Bureaud, executive director of investor advocacy organization FAIR Canada told the Globe. “And clearly, if the flyer was handed out outside the Jays game in Toronto, I think there’s a strong concern here that they may have breached the terms of that settlement.”
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Carly Lewis is a journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times and the New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Wired, Interview Magazine, Pitchfork, Elle, and Maclean’s, where she is a contributing editor. Her work has been recognized by the National Magazine Awards and the Digital Publishing Awards. She reports on city life, culture—including what people do online—politics, art and crime. She received the Dave Greber Freelance Writers Award for “The Murder of Ashley Wadsworth,” an investigative feature about a Canadian teenager who was killed by a man she met on social media, published by Maclean’s.
