N.L. chief medical examiner has begun tracking gambling as a risk factor in suicides 

Brad Glynn says “postvention”—the actions taken in response to suicides—is an essential type of prevention. As executive director of the mental health nonprofit Lifewise NL, having data on risk factors which lead to these deaths is useful to his organization’s peer support and public education. It will soon have access to data for a risk factor that’s been long neglected in Newfoundland and Labrador: gambling.

The Independent has learned that, in mid-November, the province’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME) began collecting data on gambling as a risk factor for suicide. The office says “[t]here is also on-going retrospective data collection for all suicides for the period of November 15, 2024-November 15, 2025.”

This makes good on a 2024 OCME promise to explore tracking gambling-related suicides, “as well as a number of potential suicide risk factors, for statistical tracking and reporting purposes.”

In a national investigation of gambling-related suicides in Canada supported by the Michener-Deacon Fellowship for Investigative Reporting, Newfoundland and Labrador was one of only two provinces that provided no data. Though researchers suggest at least five to 10 per cent of suicides are gambling-related, only one was clearly identified in the public record in Newfoundland and Labrador: the 2003 death of Corner Brook resident Susan Piercey.

Glynn says that with gambling as a proven risk factor for suicide, along with increased online gambling availability, it’s important to track and see this data. The November 2025 report Online Gambling Among Young Canadian Adults: A Call to Action found that of young adults who gamble online, “69.4 per cent met the criteria for problem gambling and 23.5 per cent reported experiencing a high level of gambling-related harms.”

According to 2024 survey data from Mental Health Research Canada, one-fifth of Newfoundlanders and Labradorians overall show some signs of risky gambling behaviours, with seven per cent exhibiting signs of gambling problems.

“It’s great that we’re starting to track this,” Glynn says. “I think that’s where learning can happen for government, for the health system, for community organizations like us, and even for individuals to understand the real impacts.”

Though the OCME’s plan represents a step forward, the office isn’t willing to share details about how the policy change works in practice.

The Independent first learned of the change in December 2025 and was told Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Nash Denic would be unavailable for an interview. We provided a list of written questions instead, but an unnamed person from the OCME said it was “short staffed over the holiday season” and couldn’t respond until the new year.

The questions included what methods the OCME would use to track risk factor information, if it was borrowing from practices of other Canadian coroner or medical examiner offices, and what other suicide risk factors it would track besides gambling.

In January, the OCME declined to answer the questions. “Unfortunately, the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner cannot share publicly our processes for investigation and data collection in cases of suspected suicide,” an unnamed source said over email. “However, we can assure you that we have included data collection for gambling as a risk factor for suicide in our investigative process.”

The Independent also contacted Minister of Health and Community Services and Minister of Mental Health and Addictions Lela Evans to discuss the policy change. She did not agree to an interview either. Instead, her communications staff shared a statement that offered no further insight into the information gaps on the OCME’s new approach to tracking gambling-related suicides.

Without insights from the government or the OCME, it’s challenging, if not impossible, to understand how effective new suicide risk factor tracking methods will be.

Angela Rintoul, principal research fellow of gambling and suicide at the University of Melbourne, says an imperfect system is better than none. “You’ve got to start somewhere,” she says, as long as inefficiencies are identified and best practices evolve and improve.

The definition of “gambling-related” is key to understanding the process, according to Rintoul. Generally, in Canada, suicides that coroners or medical examiners associate with gambling as a risk factor fall into two categories: gambling is mentioned in a suicide note or directly in interviews with those close to the deceased.

Unlike alcohol or drugs, which coroner or medical examiners can test for postmortem, gambling is invisible. “There’s no biomarker,” Rintoul says. “Before you get to the coroner’s office, you also want to be tracking a whole lot of other indicators in society.”

This includes recording diagnoses of gambling disorder in medical files, as well as how many people call helplines in suicidal distress because of gambling, or make emergency room visits or ambulance calls for gambling-related suicide attempts. All these data points can help inform suicide prevention rather than postvention efforts.

Rintoul says data vaults, an emerging type of cloud storage used in at least 15 nations to record betting data, may also help. They are set up by gambling service providers as part of their license agreement with each jurisdiction, and regulators download the data and have access to individual customer transactions right up to market-wide trends.

Data vault access offers potential for government regulators to flag potential money laundering transactions, large losses which might suggest a player needs help, and ensure customers on self-exclusion registers stay off. Coroner and medical examiner offices could also use information housed in data vaults to identify gambling habits in some suicide cases. But setting up these systems is challenging, Rintoul says, because it requires political will and a willingness from gambling operators to correct long-standing data gaps.

“They’ve got a lot of power by holding this data and continuing to profit from their most valuable customers, whilst we are scrambling around in the public health area just trying to piece very disparate pieces of the puzzle together,” she says.

With opportunities to gamble increasing both provincewide and nationwide, the need for clear data is more critical than ever. In the past few years alone, Newfoundland and Labrador has legalized single-sport betting and added an Atlantic Lottery Corporation (ALC) online casino—to say nothing of non-regulated black and grey market websites residents may access.

ALC, which generated nearly $273.5 million in net revenue last fiscal year in Newfoundland and Labrador, also runs lotteries and video lottery terminals (VLTs) across the province. The Independent contacted ALC to inform them of the change in policy, to request comment and to see if it will consider reviewing gambling-related suicide data to see how the corporation could use it in social responsibility or responsible gaming efforts.

In an emailed statement, ALC didn’t directly address the issue. “We regularly include all existing research and expert reviews in the development of both [ALC] products and healthy play activities,” communications strategist Greg Weston says in part. “We want all of our players to be informed and to play within their means and reduce the risk of gambling-related harms.”

Lifewise NL is more direct, with Glynn saying the organization can put the gambling-related suicide data to use. He adds the organization is also interested in learning more about other other suicide risk factors, like “social determinants of health,” for instance, if the deceased were facing food or housing insecurity, underemployment, or were from marginalized groups. “This overly individualized western world looks at everything as an individual problem, but suicide risk factors can be approached and can be improved at a society level,” he says.

The OCME expects to have the first gambling-related suicide statistics available at the end of 2026.