Daily Pulse

Ontario Looks At Ticket Practices

Ontario, Canada’s attorney general says her office is looking into the secondary ticketing market after outraged fans of The Tragically Hip complained that tickets for the popular Canadian band’s final tour were largely unavailable at onsale. 

Ticket reselling was made legal in Canada in July 2015, when AG Madeleine Meilleur’s office amended regulations to the country’s Ticket Speculation Act to allow companies to resell tickets, if they offered a money-back guarantee or could ensure tickets sold are authentic, according to the Toronto Star.

“The regulation allows ticketholders to resell their tickets at more than their face value on the condition that the tickets are verified by the original vendor or resold by a professional reseller with a money-back guarantee,” a spokeswoman for Meilleur told the paper. “Verification services, created and administered by the industry, are intended to help protect consumers by identifying fraudulent or duplicate tickets, and preventing them from being purchased,” she said. However, the law fails to address ticket “bots” that enable scalpers to scoop up thousands of tickets in the span of a few minutes.

Ticket speculation – the advertising of tickets for sale that the broker doesn’t own – is also legal according to the law. While Meilleur said her office is consulting with those in the ticketing industry to make the law work to better protect consumers from ticket scalpers, she added that she is not interested in regulating the price charged for tickets.

“We can’t fix the price of tickets,” she said.

FREE Daily Pulse Subscribe