People are betting on Ontario's municipal elections. Is that allowed?

As Ontario elections heat up, so are prediction markets. Online betting platforms like Polymarket and Calshi are seeing hundreds of thousands of dollars in bets being placed on who becomes mayor in Toronto, Markham, Mississauga, Oakville, Oshawa, and Milton. While there's nothing illegal about non-Canadian prediction markets hosting bets on Canadian topics like these elections, it's just that Canadians themselves can't bet on them. It's not legal for Canadians in Canada to bet on the outcomes of elections or to bet on other political events. Why are we so strict? There's a risk that you're actually going to be skewing the results of our democratic process in doing so. So there are folks who might have an interest in seeing the election go one way or another. and by making it look as though there's momentum behind a particular candidate, you can potentially affect whether or not people show up to vote, right? Okay, so Canadians can't bet on our elections, but at the time of reporting, there's more than $500,000 in bets placed on who becomes mayor across the GTA. It's unclear how many, if any, are actually Canadians finding ways around digital fences. There are still many ways that people can still access platforms like PolyMarket, like through VPNs and such, but also abroad just because so many people are invested in Toronto and know Toronto and many people might have lived in Toronto. And yeah, so I'm not surprised by the large numbers. Both Polymarket and Calshi say this is something they monitor for, but so far nothing has been flagged. Canada set its prediction market rules earlier this year, which include limiting which topics you can bet on and which platforms you can use. And these are the first Ontario municipal elections since those rules were set up. Prediction markets are just another example of the kinds of challenges that regulators have to keep on grappling with these days as technology changes so fast. The candidates themselves were caught off guard that people have been placing their bets I don't know what the odds are. I don't look at any of that stuff. That's a whole lot of money. And maybe all that money can be donated to the Library Foundation. Alicia Zell, CBC News, Toronto.