Ont. ticket price cap hard to enforce, could send fans to informal markets: experts
BNN Bloomberg
The Ontario government’s push to cap resale ticket prices for events across the province might not be much help to fans.
Experts worry the proposed legislation the government announced Friday will be unenforceable, drive up the original price of tickets and lure people into riskier transactions.
The province positioned the move as a way to tamp down on resellers who profit off fans by selling tickets to the hottest shows and games for several times their original price, but it’s “purely symbolism,” said David Clement, the North American affairs manager with the Consumer Choice Center.
“It actually doesn’t help consumers because it means that it caps prices in the regulated market and regulated platforms like Ticketmaster, StubHub, SeatGeek, but it doesn’t cap prices outside in the unregulated market,” he said.
“What we see in jurisdictions to enforce these caps is there’s just a flood of ticket sales in the unregulated market on things like Facebook Marketplace and the consumer risk there is that you have no guarantees in the unregulated market.”
In Ireland, where a ticket cap has been around since 2021, Clement said the fraud rate for concerts is around 14 per cent and for sporting events it’s almost 11 per cent.
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Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei issued his first statement on the war on Thursday, saying Iran should close the Strait of Hormuz and keep attacking its Gulf Arab neighbors as leverage. Khamenei also called on people in Gulf countries to “shut down” U.S. bases, saying promised U.S. protection is “nothing more than a lie.”
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei issued his first statement on the war on Thursday, saying that the leverage of closing the Strait of Hormuz should be used and that Iran will keep attacking its Gulf Arab neighbors. Khamenei also called on Gulf countries to “shut down” U.S. bases, saying promised U.S. protection is “nothing more than a lie.”
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei says that the leverage of closing the Strait of Hormuz should be used and that Iran’s attacks on Gulf Arab neighbours will continue. His first statement since his appointment was read on state television Thursday by a news anchor.