Skill-Testing Questions: Why Canada Makes You Do Math

You won something. A radio station, a coffee chain, a brand giveaway you entered months ago and forgot about. Then, before anyone hands over the prize, there’s a math problem and a clock. Multiply, add, divide, subtract, no calculator.

Win a contest in Canada and a skill-testing question is often the last thing standing between you and the prize. Almost nobody gets told why it’s there. It’s a workaround for the Criminal Code, which makes it an offence to give away property by pure chance. It isn’t, despite what half the internet says, something the Competition Bureau requires. And no law anywhere specifies four steps of arithmetic. That format traces back to a single Alberta courtroom in the 1980s.

Why do Canadian contests ask a skill-testing question?

Because a pure random draw run by a private company is, on a strict reading, a crime in Canada. Section 206 of the Criminal Code (opens in a new tab) makes it an offence, punishable by up to two years, to dispose of property “by lots, cards, tickets or any mode of chance whatever.” A genuine test of skill moves a contest out of the pure-chance category.

Read that phrasing closely, because the wording is doing all the work. Paragraphs 206(1)(a) through (d) say nothing about anyone paying to enter. Advertising a scheme, conducting a draw, even shipping the materials for one, are each listed separately, and chance alone is enough to trigger them. A free giveaway decided by a random draw sits uncomfortably close to that line.

A different paragraph, 206(1)(f), covers games of chance or of mixed chance and skill “in which the contestant or competitor pays money or other valuable consideration.” That one has a price tag built into it, so the fix is to make sure nobody has to pay. Which is why Canadian contest rules almost always carry two lines rather than one: no purchase necessary, and a skill-testing question required. They’re aimed at different paragraphs.

Lawyers who write these promotions describe an illegal lottery as three ingredients stacked together. Take away enough of them and you have a legal contest.

Cautious sponsors remove two of the three. That belt-and-braces habit is why you can win a free draw you paid nothing to enter and still have to do arithmetic to collect.

Does the law actually require a skill-testing question?

No, and this is the part that gets repeated wrong almost everywhere, including by reference works that ought to know better. You will read that the skill-testing question is “a legal requirement enforced by the Competition Bureau.” The Bureau’s own published material doesn’t say that.

Section 74.06 of the Competition Act (opens in a new tab), the provision that governs promotional contests, sets out three things: adequate and fair disclosure of the number and approximate value of the prizes, no undue delay in handing them out, and selection of participants or distribution of prizes “on the basis of skill or on a random basis.” Random is expressly allowed. If the Act demanded a test of skill, that clause couldn’t exist.

Go one level further and the Bureau’s consumer-facing page on promotional contests (opens in a new tab) doesn’t mention skill-testing questions at all. Its detailed enforcement guidelines (opens in a new tab) mention them once, in a short list of details that belong on the packaging of a specially marked product, alongside the closing date. That’s a rule about telling entrants what your contest involves. It isn’t a rule about what your contest has to involve.

So the accurate description is narrower and more interesting than the myth. The skill-testing question is risk management. Sponsors’ lawyers add it to keep a promotion clear of the Criminal Code, and the practice became so universal that it now reads like statute. Nobody has much incentive to be the company that tests the boundary in court.

Why is it always four steps of arithmetic?

Because an Alberta Provincial Court judge, in a 1980s case involving Canada Trust (opens in a new tab), looked at one particular question and said it was good enough. The question was: multiply 228 by 21, add 10,824, divide by 12, subtract 1,121. The answer is 180.

That’s the whole origin story of the format. One judicial nod at one four-part arithmetic problem, and marketing departments across the country copied the shape rather than risk inventing their own. The skill involved has to be real and not a sham, so a token question that anyone could answer without thinking would defeat the purpose. Four operations under time pressure, with no calculator, is the industry’s read on where “real” starts.

The term itself is older than the case. The University of British Columbia’s Dictionary of Canadianisms (opens in a new tab) traces “skill-testing question” in print back to 1962, twenty-two years before the ruling, and notes it’s used almost exclusively in Canada. That entry is also one of the places repeating the Competition Bureau line above, which is a fair measure of how far the myth has travelled.

Why don’t American sweepstakes make you do math?

Because American law defines an illegal lottery as needing all three ingredients at once: prize, chance and consideration. Knock out any one of them and the promotion is legal. US sponsors knock out consideration with a free alternate method of entry, and they’re finished. There’s no reason to touch the chance element.

Canada’s Criminal Code doesn’t work that way. Paragraphs 206(1)(a) to (d) never mention payment, so removing the purchase requirement doesn’t fully close the question. Chance itself is the exposure, and the only practical way to dilute chance is to add skill.

That single difference in drafting, decades ago, is why a Canadian who wins a gift card does mental math under a stopwatch and an American who wins the same gift card just gives an address.

What happens if you get the answer wrong?

Usually you forfeit the prize, and it passes to an alternate winner. How much room you get varies by sponsor. Some allow a second attempt, some allow exactly one, some put a clock on the question and some just want the answer written on a form you mail back. All of it is set out in the contest rules, which were published before you entered.

The trap is rarely the arithmetic itself. It’s the order of operations: multiplication and division get done before addition and subtraction, wherever they sit in the line. Take the example from our own contest rules, where the multiplication happens to come first anyway:

Move the multiplication one step along, though, and the two readings come apart. Something like 2 + 8 x 5 - 9 works out to 33 if you multiply first, and 41 if you just run across the line from the left. That’s the difference between collecting and forfeiting.

Our own contest rules spell all of this out in advance. We notify a winner within two business days, in the app, by email or by push notification, and you then have 72 hours to sit down and answer. The question applies the standard order of operations to four numbers, none bigger than 10. Once it appears you get five minutes and one attempt, and in the app a countdown runs on screen so the clock is never a surprise.

How Lodavo fits in

Lodavo runs a weekly cash draw, so all of the above applies to us too. Our winners answer a skill-testing question, our rules say no purchase necessary, and the draw is open to residents of every province and territory, including Quebec.

What’s different is how you get into the draw. You don’t buy a ticket. You link your own Canadian bank account, and every $25 of your balance earns a free ticket for that week’s draw, counted from a snapshot each Sunday. So the money you’ve already put aside keeps earning tickets week after week, and the more you save the more tickets you get. If you’re curious how the numbers and the draw itself work, we walk through the whole thing in how the Lodavo weekly draw works, and we tackle the obvious follow-up question in is prize-linked savings gambling?.

The takeaway

The skill-testing question is a small piece of legal theatre with a real purpose behind it. It exists because Canadian criminal law took a harder line on chance than American law did, and because one Alberta decision handed the country a template nobody has felt like improving on since. Next time you have to divide by 12 before anyone will hand over a prize, you’ll know it’s the Criminal Code talking.

Want a draw you enter by saving rather than spending? Download Lodavo free on the Apple App Store (opens in a new tab) or Google Play Store (opens in a new tab), connect your bank in a couple of minutes, and start collecting tickets for the weekly draw.

Terms and conditions apply. No purchase necessary (alternate method of entry available). Skill-testing question required. Open to legal residents of Canada who are the age of majority. Odds depend on the number of eligible entries received. Full rules and odds at our contest rules.