Why hospital 50/50s with massive jackpots now seem to be everywhere
· Toronto Sun
Every month, Glenn Craig of Thunder Bay gets on the phone to tell somebody they’ve won a lot of money.
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Often, the amount is many millions of dollars. A year ago, it was $6.4 million.
That last call is documented, as most of Craig’s calls are, in a video clip posted to YouTube.
It’s entitled “December’s $6,436,355 Winner Reaction Will Make You Cry!”
By the end of the conversation, Craig is struggling to keep it together.
That happens after the recipients, Natalie and her husband Clem, tell Craig that they’ve only just arrived back from bringing their son and new grandchild to the airport for their return to Calgary.
It was the first time they’d seen their boy in six years.
“I think this is a call that’s going to change your lives,” Craig manages to choke out on the phone. “I think the frequency of your visits to Calgary can increase from every six years.”
Craig is president and CEO of the Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences Foundation . The winnings he unveils each month are half the proceeds from the Thunder Bay 50/50 , an online raffle that helps fund hospitals across Ontario’s Northwest, from Thunder Bay to Kenora to Sioux Lookout.
It may be the most successful hospital cash lottery in Canada.
Over the course of the 12 months ending March 31, Craig said, the foundation’s 50/50 will likely have raised $20 million.
Since launching in early 2021, it has created three dozen millionaires .
Its largest prize — $7,720,930 — went in December to Patrick Chilton of Timmins and Moose Factory.
“We have now handed out over $94 million in prizes over five years,” Craig said, though “it’s really been in the last two and a half, three years” that those figures began to snowball.
They’re called 50/50s, but only the winner actually sees half the jackpot. After overhead expenses such as marketing and other costs, foundations often manage to put just 35 per cent of each dollar into the organizations they serve.
Craig said that by keeping its operations in-house where possible, Thunder Bay’s costs remain lower than that.
Among other things, the proceeds collected by his foundation are helping cover renovations at the Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences Centre’s emergency department, underway now, including part of the $10 million in new equipment paid for by the raffle last year alone.
And while the winnings are huge, the lottery operation is surprisingly small — a team of just three full-time equivalent employees will be responsible for bringing in roughly $50 to $60 million in sales this year, Craig said.
How did hospital 50/50s get so big?
Though hospital lotteries are nothing new, the trend (especially toward larger jackpots) took off during COVID, and particularly in Ontario’s north — Sault Ste. Marie, Sudbury, Thunder Bay.
Fuelling that growth was a regulatory move by the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario allowing online ticket purchases anywhere in the province.
Indeed, many of Craig’s phone calls are to a different area code, with recent winners hailing from towns like Pembroke, Dryden and Hanmer.
Craig has become the envy of hospital foundation leaders across Ontario — a fundraising master who’s managed to crack the 50/50 formula.
His success has not gone unnoticed. Hospital foundations across Ontario are trying to replicate it, especially in Ottawa.
CHEO Foundation has run a 50/50 in conjunction with its Dream of a Lifetime Lottery since 2013, totalling $23 million in ticket sales over that time. Five years ago it introduced the CHEO 50/50 , averaging $2 million in sales annually, according to president and CEO Steve Read.
The Queensway Carleton Hospital Foundation, meanwhile, launched its 50/50 in January to mark the hospital’s 50th anniversary. It will run at least until the end of 2026.
Craig’s fundraising peers cite his ingenuity and retail savvy.
“Marketing,” says the Queensway Carleton foundation’s president and CEO Shannon Gorman, is the secret to his success.
“You look at the Thunder Bay Health Sciences lottery, they have done such an incredible job and really — we’re trying to model after that.
“We heard from quite a few of our board members and people on the street that they’re supporting that lottery because it does climb quite quickly. We thought, ‘Hey, why not us?'”
Hospital foundation leaders wish it didn’t have to be this way.
“We would love it if people would just give us money and we wouldn’t have to run a lottery,” Gorman said, laughing.
But the fact remains: Ontario hospitals desperately need the money.
More than 50 per cent of hospitals across eastern Ontario are projecting deficits this year .
Bruyère Health is reportedly cutting 55 front-line nurses and personal support workers as it tries to stem the bleeding from an annual operating deficit of more than $12 million in 2025. (The hospital’s foundation also has a staff lottery 50/50, with a draw every two weeks, on payday.)
Shortfalls in Ontario have meant more hallway medicine and, in Ottawa, even treatment in a hospital garage .
In that environment, charitable gaming is seen as part of the solution to making up hospital costs not covered by provincial health care funding.
But lotteries also aren’t a surefire solution as the Guelph General Hospital and the Georgian Bay General Hospital Foundation both paused theirs, with the latter citing “the costs to operate the lottery.“
Getting a Bump
Driving the growth in hospital lotteries in recent years is the increasingly high-tech business of raffles themselves. If in the past 50/50 draws were run out of legions and church basements, they are now highly regulated digital operations requiring considerable expertise.
The North American market leader in this game, Bump, is headquartered in Ottawa, in a low-slung industrial park in Nepean.
A subsidiary of the Canadian Bank Note Company , it has been instrumental in the lobbying efforts that led to the rise in charitable gaming.
Electronic raffles began proliferating in this province after the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario, or AGCO, started permitting them in 2019. In October 2021, for example, it licensed around 750 electronic raffles . That number is now 4,188, including 3,254 licenses for 50/50s, according to AGCO spokesperson Shae Greenfield.
The key change was an e-commerce tweak permitting online ticket purchases anywhere in Ontario.
“We’ve actually worked with regulators to help change policy, to open up opportunities like e-commerce,” says Patric McKechnie, director of lottery program management at Bump. “I truly believe that we haven’t tapped even close to the full potential of the industry yet.”
But such growth raises concerns for some — concerns underscored by the disclaimers at the bottom of all foundation-run gaming sites, which ask that ticket purchasers “please play responsibly.” That plea is followed by contact information for the Problem Gambling Helpline.
The rise of hospital lotteries “could send the message that gambling is OK or even virtuous — really concerning given the current epidemic of sports gambling,” said Jeremy Snyder, a medical ethicist and professor in the Faculty of Health Sciences at Simon Fraser University.
“Fifty-fifties have always seemed a little more virtuous — it’s just built into it: ‘Half of this money’s going to a good cause,'” he said. “But it is interesting to wonder if by that digital nature, when you reduce barriers to something, you make it easier for those addictive behaviours to be facilitated, in the sense that it can normalize that behaviour.”
Similar worries have led the U.S., for example, to look askance at 50/50 lotteries. But the gap between it and Canada may now be narrowing on this score.
Changing the rules
In 2015, Corporate Counsel Now , a digital magazine for in-house lawyers in the U.S. and Canada, investigated the 50/50 trend following news reports detailing record-breaking jackpots in Canada.
The magazine found that while 50/50s often remained illegal in the U.S., where they were seen as gambling, they were deeply entrenched in Canada, where a handful of high-tech startups latched onto the campaigns by offering digital back end services to sports teams and venues.
These Canadian firms then set about agitating for rule changes both domestically and in the U.S.
In Ontario, those efforts led to AGCO’s 2019 regulatory tweaks.
“This created larger jackpots and increased the opportunities for the general public to support charitable initiatives,” explained Greenfield, the AGCO spokesperson.
The reasons for those larger jackpots aren’t all immediately obvious.
The number of tickets that can be sold in a digital raffle is unlimited — no one needs to print off a roll of tearaway tickets ahead of time — and prospective players can track the growing jackpot in real time, which ups the momentum and heightens the sense of urgency among those thinking of buying in.
Bump, the Ottawa-based company, was first to take advantage of the new AGCO rules, offering an e-commerce solution to the Ottawa Senators Community Foundation . More importantly, the advent of the new rules dovetailed with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, when social distancing stymied attendance at pro sporting events as well as traditional fundraising.
That led hospital foundations to turn toward raffles and to an uptick in business for firms like Bump. Acquired by Canadian Bank Note in 2021, Bump now has relationships with 350 non-profits across North America, with plans to expand worldwide in 2026, according to McKechnie.
The company now runs 85 per cent of all pro-sports lotteries in North America, McKechnie said, from the Edmonton Oilers-associated EOCF 50/50 to the Daytona 500 50/50 Draw in Florida to the Super Bowl LX 50/50 Raffle in February benefiting the 49ers Foundation.
In Thunder Bay and elsewhere, meanwhile, 50/50s seemed like a good idea during COVID. But no one imagined how lucrative they’d prove.
“It was a COVID pivot,” said Craig, “but it has levelled up our operations.”
Craig’s team has shaped the raw materials of AGCO’s regulatory changes and Bump’s services into something unique to Thunder Bay — unique and lucrative.
“We have created a program that I think has a personality and a brand,” Craig said. “I think we have captured people’s attention.”
And his next phone call is just weeks away.
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