Just Explain It: What are the odds of winning the lottery in Canada?

It always starts casual.

Maybe a simple “what would you do if you won a million dollars?” conversation followed by a practical pay-down-the-debt response peppered with a few obligatory family and friend handouts.

But these conversations tend to quickly devolve into discussions about island ownership (that’ll cost you more than a million dollars unless you’re shooting for somewhere modest and unkempt in the Canadian Shield) and musing about monkey butlers (we hear IKEA monkey is looking for a job … ).

The beauty is there’s nothing more frugal than daydreaming about winning the lottery.

But Canadians don’t just dream – they spend, forking over around $13.7 billion a year on government-run lotteries, video lottery terminals, casinos and slot machines not in casinos, according to Statscan.

It seems all those $5 tickets add up.

Canadians don’t seem to mind, with a quarter admitting they purchase a ticket weekly (probably better for you than spending that fiver on fast food). Our best advice – put the dollars aside and earn that monkey butler or modest island the hard-working, bit-by-bit savings way.

As Yahoo Canada Finance’s Ashleigh Patterson points out in this weeks Just Explain It, the odds of winning the lottery are not really in your favour.