What Makes a Ticket "National"
Most scratch tickets are regional — an OLG game only exists in Ontario, a WCLC game only in Western Canada. But a handful of games each year are released as national tickets: a single print run divided up and distributed to all five Canadian lottery operators — WCLC, OLG, BCLC, Loto-Québec, and the Atlantic Lottery Corporation — and sold simultaneously coast to coast.
You'll recognise these on Scratchers Edge by the National tag on the ticket card. Games like the $30 30X, the $50 Extreme, and the $100 Elite are all national tickets. When a game is this popular, the lottery corporations produce it together rather than each running their own separate version.
ℹ️ Why go national? National tickets are typically the premium or high-dollar games — $30, $50, $100 price points — where the top prizes are large enough to justify a massive shared print run. Pooling production across all provinces allows for bigger prize tiers than any single region could support on its own.
The Problem With the Prize Count
Here's the thing that matters for players: WCLC reports the total remaining top prizes across the whole country — not just the prizes allocated to Western Canada.
So when the WCLC website says a national ticket has, say, 8 top prizes remaining, that's 8 prizes spread across British Columbia, Western Canada, Ontario, Quebec, and Atlantic Canada combined. If you're buying that ticket at a shop in Calgary, you're only competing for the fraction of tickets and prizes allocated to WCLC's region.
Based on the ticket distribution data we track at Scratchers Edge, WCLC typically receives around 17% of a national print run. Ontario gets the largest share (roughly 38%), with Quebec second (around 21%), followed by BC (around 16%) and Atlantic Canada (about 7%).
A Real Example: $30 30X
The $30 30X is a national ticket with a total print run of about 4.84 million tickets. Here's how that breaks down by region:
| Region | Operator | Tickets Allocated | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ontario | OLG | 1,854,000 | 38% |
| Quebec | Loto-Québec | 1,030,000 | 21% |
| Western Canada | WCLC | 824,000 | 17% |
| British Columbia | BCLC | 772,500 | 16% |
| Atlantic Canada | ALC | 360,000 | 7% |
So if WCLC's website shows 10 top prizes remaining on this game, roughly 1 or 2 of those prizes are realistically accessible to a player buying tickets in Alberta, Saskatchewan, or Manitoba. The other 8 or 9 are sitting in Ontario, Quebec, BC, or Atlantic Canada stores.
Why WCLC Reports the National Total
This isn't a mistake or an attempt to mislead players. The prize structures on national tickets are set at the national level — the prize odds printed on the ticket are calculated against the full print run. Reporting the total remaining prizes is technically accurate to what the ticket promises.
But it does mean that reading remaining prize counts on national tickets requires a different mental model than regional tickets. For a regional WCLC game, "10 top prizes remaining" means 10 prizes accessible to players in your region. For a national game, you need to mentally apply your region's share — roughly 17% for WCLC — to get an estimate of prizes realistically near you.
💡 Quick rule of thumb: If you're in Western Canada and a national ticket shows N top prizes remaining, your region likely holds roughly N × 0.17 of those prizes. A game showing 12 remaining nationally has maybe 2 prizes in WCLC territory. For BC players, use 0.16; for Ontario, 0.38.
How Scratchers Edge Handles This
We tag national tickets clearly on the site so you know what you're looking at. The prize data we display for national tickets comes directly from WCLC's published figures — which, as explained above, reflect the national total. We're working on surfacing the regional share more explicitly so the remaining prize count is easier to interpret at a glance.
In the meantime, the national tag is your signal to apply the adjustment. A regional ticket showing strong remaining prizes is a more straightforward signal than the same count on a national ticket — where most of those prizes are in another province entirely.
⚠️ Responsible gambling reminder: Only spend what you can afford to lose. If gambling is affecting you or someone you care about, visit responsiblegambling.org or call 1-800-522-4700.