The law
AGLC and AiGC, the regulator and the corporation, and who does what
Two sets of initials appear on almost every page about Alberta's online market, and they are easy to confuse (both are public, and both deal with the same operators). One is a regulator that has existed for decades, while the other is a corporation created in 2025 to stand between the province and the private operators, and a player meets each of them at a different moment.
AGLC: the regulator
Alberta Gaming, Liquor and Cannabis is the agency that regulates gambling in the province, as its long name suggests, alongside two other trades that the province chose to supervise from one place (cannabis joined the other two when it became legal in 2018). In the online market it "registers" operators, which is the Alberta word for what other jurisdictions call licensing, and it writes the standards they must meet, audits them against those standards and runs the province's "self-exclusion" programme.
It is also an operator in its own right, to the surprise of people expecting a regulator to stand apart from the market. Since 2020 AGLC has run Play Alberta, the province's own gambling site, and that site continues beside the private ones (our page on Play Alberta explains why that is less odd than it sounds, and what may happen to it).
AiGC: the corporation
The Alberta iGaming Corporation is a "Crown corporation" (a company owned by the province) created by the iGaming Alberta Act, and its job is to conduct and manage online gambling, as the Criminal Code requires a province to do. It does so by signing a "commercial agreement" with each operator registered by AGLC (the contract that turns a registered company into a site that may take bets).
It then notifies each operator when it may start, publishes the list of registered sites and receives the complaints that operators have failed to resolve. It also speaks to players directly, through a section of its site with "questions and answers" that we quote often, since it settles points (the age, the location, the tax) the trade tends to blur in its own documents.
| Task | AGLC | AiGC |
|---|---|---|
| Registers the operator | yes | no |
| Writes the standards | yes | no |
| Signs the commercial agreement | no | yes |
| Notifies the start of operations | no | yes |
| Publishes the list of registered sites | no | yes |
| Runs self-exclusion | yes | no |
| Takes complaints after 72 hours | no | yes |
| Runs Play Alberta | yes | no |
The order of the steps
An operator's path into the market runs through both bodies in a fixed order. The order explains most of what a player sees. First the company applies to AGLC and is "registered", then it signs its agreement with AiGC, and only when AiGC "notifies" the launch may it take deposits and bets. That is also the moment its site appears on the public list (fifty-one sites when we read it on November 12, 2026).
That sequence is the reason the list, rather than any "badge", is the right thing to check. A company can be registered with AGLC and not yet live, or live in another province and not registered here at all, and only the list reflects the last step, as the page on how to check a site shows with the details that tend to be missed.
Where a player meets each of them
Most players will never write to either body, and that is as it should be in a market that works as the province intended. The moments when they do are predictable, though: a request for "self-exclusion" goes to AGLC (in person at a GameSense Info Centre, or online by appointment after a call to the programme), while a complaint that an operator has left unresolved for seventy-two hours goes to AiGC through its "contact page".
The distinction matters because the two bodies hold different "levers". AGLC can act against an operator's registration, whereas AiGC holds the contract and the commercial relationship; a complaint lands with the corporation, which can bring the full weight of that relationship to bear, and a pattern of complaints is exactly what a regulator wants to know about (and what AGLC can act on)!
The contacts we would keep
AGLC's self-exclusion line is 780-447-7582, or toll-free 1-844-468-8034, and its address is se@aglc.ca. AiGC's site is abigaming.ca, where the list, the questions for players and the complaint form all live; both are "public bodies", and neither charges anything for what is described here.
What neither body does
Neither body rates casinos, recommends them or vouches for their games beyond the standards, and neither will tell you which site to choose (a restraint we think entirely proper in a public body). That is our job, in a narrow sense: we print what the list says, the company behind each site and what we could check, and we leave the choice to you (with the protections described here as the floor beneath it).
Neither body can help with a site that is not on the list either, since an unregistered operator has no agreement with AiGC and no registration with AGLC. A player with a dispute on such a site is on their own, which is the strongest practical reason we know for checking the list first, as the page on sites that are not on the list explains in more detail.
By the Alberta Casinos Online editorial team · Last updated: November 13, 2026 · Online since 2026
