Ontario is planning on banning for-profit ticket touting, or ticket scalping if you prefer. Confirming that plan, the Canadian province’s Premier Doug Ford declared on social media on Friday that, “we’re putting ticket scalpers on notice: Your days of ripping people off are done”.
Back in 2019, Ford’s Conservative government blocked proposals made by the rival Liberal Party to introduce a 50% price cap on ticket resale. At the time Ford’s colleague Bill Walker, then Consumer Services Minister, said the price cap would be “unenforceable” and the Liberal Party’s proposal to regulate ticket resale was just “a nice soundbite”.
But Ford changed his position on ticket scalping last year amid uproar over the prices being charged by scalpers for tickets to World Series baseball games between the LA Dodgers and Toronto Blue Jays, with scalped tickets for the final game in the play offs selling for well over $1000, and scalped tickets for prime seats in the stadium topping $21,000.
That episode has prompted Ford to go much further than a 50% price cap, instead proposing to outlaw for-profit scalping entirely. In a statement last week, his government said it was “taking action to propose amendments to the Ticket Sales Act 2017, to combat overpriced ticket resale prices”.
The proposed new law, the statement explained, would “make it illegal for tickets for live events in Ontario to be re-sold for more than their original cost, which is the all-in price originally paid to the primary seller, plus any fees, service charges or applicable taxes charged on the resale”.
The regulation of ticket resale is currently being reviewed and ramped up in numerous countries and states around the world. These regulations are unsurprisingly strongly opposed by scalpers and touts, and the resale platforms they utilise like StubHub and Viagogo.
The proposals in Ontario are very similar to those in the process of being implemented in the UK, where the Labour government last year said it would also ban for-profit ticket resale.
As with the UK government’s plans, ministers in Ontario are also looking at how to regulate the additional fees charged by ticket resale sites, to ensure that those sites don’t just hike up their fees - and share those fees with the scalpers - in order to circumvent the ban on for-profit scalping.
With that in mind, the Ontario government says it will “create new powers that could be used to stop unfair service charges and fees during the purchasing process”.
Commenting on the plans in Ontario, the province’s Minister Of Public And Business Service Delivery And Procurement, Stephen Crawford, says, “With these new measures, consumers would no longer need to worry about being ripped-off in the ticket resale market, and more families and fans would have the opportunity to see their favourite band or sports team perform live”.