Onward For Ontario Ticket Bill

Ticketing companies could soon be banned from reselling their own tickets in the province of Ontario.

Officials introduced a bill in April 2009 after a Canadian class action suit was filed earlier that year claiming Ticketmaster had conspired to divert popular tickets to its subsidiary TicketsNow resale site.

If passed, the Ticket Speculation Amendment Act would modify an existing law that prohibits people from buying or selling tickets at prices above face value. The proposal would add language to prohibit companies from reselling tickets at inflated prices through related companies.

While the bill has slowly made its way through the legislature, it is expected to head to a committee for further amendment, then undergo another reading before being brought up for a vote “hopefully … before Christmas,” a representative for Attorney General Chris Bentley told the CBC.

The AG dismissed reports that the amendment is Ticketmaster specific, despite that TM is the largest primary ticket seller operating a secondary ticketing site in the country.

“People want to know when they try to get tickets … that most of the tickets haven’t suddenly been instantaneously flipped to some other related secondary seller where they have to pay many times the face value,” Bentley added.