Salim Valji

Salim Valji reports for the CBC, covering sports and related issues with a focus on how games, gambling and fandom intersect with policy and everyday life. His recent work centres on Alberta’s emerging sports betting and online gambling market, tracking how regulatory changes, commercial operators and advertising campaigns affect fans and residents. He brings a background in national sports reporting and bilingual, cross-platform work that lets him move between rink-side coverage, business stories and larger social questions.

Sports betting and gambling markets

Valji’s recent reporting follows the rollout of Alberta’s online gambling market from the licensing stage through to consumer impact.

He has detailed the rush of gambling operators applying for licences ahead of the provincial market opening, using clear numbers and regulatory context to show the scale of commercial interest. In his coverage of Alberta opening its online gambling market following Ontario’s lead, he explains how the change expands sports betting products available to consumers and reshapes the competitive landscape.

He then tracks how private, commercial operators and their advertising campaigns are changing what Albertans see and hear around sports, highlighting concerns about the proliferation of betting opportunities and online casinos.

Valji also examines political risk, including how betting on Alberta separatism could influence public opinion and political dynamics, bringing experts into the conversation to underline those stakes. Across these pieces he treats sports gambling as an economic and regulatory beat, but keeps the focus on community impact, fairness and the balance between entertainment and harm.

Sports, community and social connection

Valji’s feature on Beltline bikers who revel in their sense of community while engine revving irritates neighbours shows his interest in sports-adjacent scenes where camaraderie and conflict coexist. He uses that kind of story to explore how shared activities can both bind participants together and strain relations with people who do not share the passion.

He brings the same lens to reporting that asks how people make friends and socialize in an era of digital communication, including work that takes him into bars and public spaces to speak directly with people about how they connect. In that coverage he uses examples such as the Calgary Sport and Social Club to show how recreational leagues foster mutual support and accountability, emphasizing what teammates expect of one another and how winning and losing becomes a social event as much as a competitive one.

The reporting relies on in-person interviews and street-level conversations, grounding broad ideas about isolation and belonging in specific voices rather than commentary.

Cross-platform sports reporting and bilingual work

Valji’s current beat is built on years of sports coverage across television, digital and print, including work on the Calgary Flames, the Stampeders and the CFL for a national sports network.

His background includes bylines in major outlets such as the New York Times, ESPN, the Montreal Gazette, Canadian Press, CTV and the CBC, which demonstrates his ability to tailor stories to different formats and editorial standards while keeping the reporting sharp. He has experience reporting and presenting in both of Canada’s official languages, including live sports segments for Radio-Canada as well as field and studio work for the CBC.

That mix of live hits, broadcast storytelling and longer-form pieces shapes his written work, which often carries the pacing and scene-setting of television while retaining the sourcing and clarity of news features. For communications and team personnel, this means he is comfortable with both granular sports detail and broader narrative framing, and can move quickly from locker-room context to policy implications when the story demands it.

Experience beyond sports and how it informs his beat

Alongside sports, Valji has reported on politics and covered national elections in Canada and France, giving him fluency in how policy, identity and institutional power operate beyond the rink or stadium. He has also worked in public relations and communications and as an obituaries columnist, experience that informs his sensitivity to how organizations, families and communities present themselves in moments of scrutiny or loss. Those threads show up in his sports work in the way he pays attention to small details of language and presentation, foregrounds individual voices and keeps an eye on how decisions by regulators, leagues and companies reverberate through ordinary lives. Taken together, his portfolio is distinguished by a habit of treating sports as a lens on social and economic change rather than a self-contained world, whether he is tracking a new gambling regime, examining neighbourhood tensions around recreational activities or chronicling how people seek connection through shared games.