Canadian Heritage Committee on May 7th, 2019

[Martin Shields, Conservative, Bow River, AB]

Exactly. I hope they do, but they need a new stadium.

We have the NAC here right in town. It's interesting that if you phone over to get tickets, often you can't get tickets, but I can walk over there and get them. I find it frustrating. We have our own National Arts Centre here in town and it sells its tickets through Ticketmaster and tells you that you can't get tickets, yet you can walk over and buy the seats that they say aren't there.

I find that, as a consumer, frustrating.

[Jean-Françoys Brousseau]

Absolutely. I understand.

[Martin Shields, Conservative, Bow River, AB]

But you know it happens.

[Jean-Françoys Brousseau]

Yes. There are so many channels that there's always a way to get a ticket.

[Martin Shields, Conservative, Bow River, AB]

Yes, and this is paying a cheaper price than Ticketmaster has by walking in the door and buying them.

Being an old guy, I remember when you'd show up at the sports stadium and there would be scalpers there, but you knew when there would be no scalpers there: when the police showed up. Then, the scalpers were all gone.

You've used the word “enforcement”. What do you mean by ”enforcement”? It's not guys on the street with stripes on their pants who can do this anymore. How would you enforce it?

[Erin Benjamin]

That's the question. It depends on what piece of legislation you're talking about, but if we're talking about bot technology or finding the guy on Kijiji, it's incredibly hard, if not impossible. This is why, when we've had conversations with various provinces around ticket legislation, we steer towards things that, from a technology perspective, we can respond to.

As to the public awareness opportunity, it depends on whether government wants to invest the resources required to figure out how to enforce it and then actually do the business of enforcing. It's extremely expensive, I would imagine, and challenging.

[Martin Shields, Conservative, Bow River, AB]

Yes.

[Erin Benjamin]

It's a multi-bazillion dollar industry, and because it's so big, we'll always have these problems.

The technology changes rapidly, and again, you're going to hear from some people as witnesses who will share with you their experience. They work at the ground level and they're the ones actually trying to do this on a daily basis. You'll hear some horror stories about how it actually works.

Enforcement is just one part of the conversation. That's why I keep talking about consumer awareness, which should be more of a priority because it's simply more manageable.

[Martin Shields, Conservative, Bow River, AB]

Thank you.

[Jean-Françoys Brousseau]

When I referred to enforcement, one example would be when we know somebody who has been selling the same ticket over and over, a fraud. We know where they are, but there's no interest in legal action by anybody because nobody's bleeding; there is no emergency.

[Martin Shields, Conservative, Bow River, AB]

Right.

[Jean-Françoys Brousseau]

It's a crime without an explicit victim, so it's very hard to take legal action against somebody who we know is doing this.

[Martin Shields, Conservative, Bow River, AB]

Its victim is the performer who can't get the revenue.

Thanks.

[The Chair, Liberal, Julie Dabrusin]

Thank you.

Now we'll go to Mr. Long, for the final five minutes.

[Wayne Long, Liberal, Saint John—Rothesay, NB]

Thank you, Madam Chair; and thank you to the witnesses for coming in this afternoon and presenting.

I come at this from a somewhat unique perspective. I'm a New England Patriots season ticket holder. I owned a major junior hockey team in Saint John, New Brunswick. I've bought tickets. I've sold tickets, and so on and so forth.

One of the first things I want to talk about, though, is just drilling back to the onus on the teams or the performers. As as case in point, I would venture to say that secondary ticket sales for, let's say, the Ottawa Senators this year were not very good.

[Jean-Françoys Brousseau]

Or last year, or the year before....

[Wayne Long, Liberal, Saint John—Rothesay, NB]

A few years ago they were pretty good.

That said, you can still go on a secondary site, whether it's StubHub or what have you, and buy tickets. However, what a lot of people don't realize is that you can just go down to the Ottawa Senators box office and buy tickets directly.

For example, I could look at upper bowl tickets on the secondary market and they would be $65. I could go down to Kanata, walk into the Canadian Tire Centre and buy upper bowl tickets in the same section for $39. How much onus is on the teams and on the performers to get the word out that there are tickets for their own events for sale?

I certainly think the study is extremely important. It's important for a lot of Canadian families that tend to fall into always buying tickets in the secondary market and paying more for them.

How much onus is on the actual teams? Should the Ottawa Senators be promoting much more that you can buy tickets directly from them?

[Jean-Françoys Brousseau]

A lot of teams have their own secondary market now for season ticket holders. The one nuance from what you said is the quality of the seat. When you're a business person and you want to invite three people to see a game, you don't want to sit in the bleachers. Those tickets might not be available from the box office.

I don't know about Ottawa, but they wouldn't be available in Montreal, for example, for the Canadiens. However, there were seats available for a while in the higher levels—

[Wayne Long, Liberal, Saint John—Rothesay, NB]

There were.

[Jean-Françoys Brousseau]

—and you're correct that there's still a secondary market. You have season ticket holders who don't want to attend all the games and they list them. Remember, seeing it listed on the secondary market doesn't mean it will sell.

People sometimes confuse its being listed at x with its being sold at x. That's not quite how it happens. Tickets can sit there for a long time.

[Wayne Long, Liberal, Saint John—Rothesay, NB]

Do you see the same parallels in the music industry, too?

[Jean-Françoys Brousseau]

No.

[Wayne Long, Liberal, Saint John—Rothesay, NB]

Is it totally different?

[Erin Benjamin]

There are no tickets for sale at the box office for a high-demand show.

[Jean-Françoys Brousseau]

For the concerts, it's a sellout.