Sherry H. Stewart — gambling researcher and Izzi Casino author

Sherry H. Stewart

• Position: Professor, Departments of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience, and Community Health & Epidemiology
• Role: Research Director, Mood, Anxiety, and Addiction Comorbidity (MAAC) Lab
• Institution: Dalhousie University (Canada)
• Country: Canada

About the author

Sherry H. Stewart is one of Canada’s most substantive researchers in the area of gambling behaviour, addictions, and their intersection with anxiety and mood disorders. A registered psychologist and full professor at Dalhousie University in Halifax, she has maintained an active research programme spanning over three decades — publishing extensively on the cognitive, emotional, and motivational mechanisms that drive problematic gambling, and developing evidence-based prevention and intervention approaches applied in clinical and community settings across Canada. She contributes to this publication independently, without commercial arrangements with Izzi Casino or any affiliated entity.

The Canadian online gambling market was changing rapidly when Stewart first started covering it. Ontario had launched its regulated iGaming market, bringing formal provincial oversight to a space that had operated in regulatory ambiguity for years. International operators were entering the Canadian market at pace, each with varying levels of genuine commitment to player protection, fair bonus terms, and responsible gambling infrastructure. Her research background gives her coverage a grounding that distinguishes it from promotional content dressed as player guidance — she evaluates platform policies against the evidence base on what interventions actually protect players, not against marketing narratives about what operators claim to offer.

What Sherry H. Stewart covers at Izzi Casino

Stewart’s contributions to Izzi Casino’s Canadian content cover the topics that sit between the game library and the player’s actual experience of using the platform — the terms, the policies, the protections, and the advertising standards that shape what the relationship between player and operator actually looks like in practice.

• Responsible gambling — evidence-grounded explanations of how to recognize when gambling patterns have shifted, how to use the tools platforms provide, and where to find external support — in language that respects the reader’s intelligence and doesn’t assume they are in crisis simply because they are reading the page
• Terms and conditions — plain-language walkthroughs of the provisions that matter most: wagering requirement structures, account closure terms, verification requirements, withdrawal conditions — without losing accuracy
• Privacy policy — serious treatment of what data Izzi Casino collects, why it collects it, who it shares it with, and what Canadian players can do to exercise their rights under PIPEDA and provincial frameworks
• Gambling advertising rules and consumer protection — examination of what advertising standards apply to operators serving Canadian players, what those standards require in practice, and what players can do when promotional content doesn’t meet those requirements
• Bonus guides — coverage that goes beyond headline figures to explain wagering requirements, game contribution rates, maximum bet restrictions, and expiry periods with the same analytical care applied to regulatory topics

Research and writing approach

Stewart’s research methodology is grounded in primary source verification. When she writes about Canadian gambling regulation, she works from the actual legislative and regulatory texts — the Competition Act, PIPEDA, the AGCO’s Registrar’s Standards, Ad Standards Canada’s Code — rather than from secondary summaries that may have simplified or outdated details. When she writes about platform policies, she reads the current version of those policies rather than relying on descriptions of what they typically contain.

Where possible, she works through the processes she writes about rather than simply describing them from documentation — account settings navigation, responsible gambling tool activation, complaint pathway access, verification document submission flows. This approach produces writing that is accurate to current regulatory reality rather than to a generalized version of it. The Canadian iGaming regulatory environment in 2026 is not static, and she treats currency as a core professional obligation — monitoring updates from the AGCO, iGaming Ontario, the Competition Bureau, Ad Standards Canada, and provincial responsible gambling bodies as a routine part of her work.

Contact and professional resources

Stewart’s academic profile, research publications, and laboratory information are accessible at medicine.dal.ca — Dalhousie University’s Department of Psychiatry faculty page, where her peer-reviewed publications, graduate supervision record, and ongoing research projects are documented.