Madam Chair and members of the committee, thank you for the invitation.
My name is Philip Vanden Brande. I am the senior manager of public and media relations for Groupe CH, as well as the company's spokesperson.
Through its live entertainment divisions evenko and L'Équipe Spectra, Groupe CH is Canada's leading event promoter and festival producer, presenting over 1,500 shows and major festivals yearly, such as Osheaga Music and Arts Festival, Festival international de jazz de Montréal, Francos de Montréal, Heavy Montréal, ÎleSoniq, '77 Montréal, Montréal en lumière, Nuit blanche à Montréal and others.
Groupe CH events attract millions of happy fans every year, hundreds of thousands of whom come from outside Quebec and Canada, generating tens of millions of dollars in economic windfall for the community. Groupe CH also manages several venues in the greater Montreal region, including the Bell Centre, Place Bell, MTELUS, Corona Theatre, l'Étoile and l'Astral. With its artistic agencies, evenko and Spectra Musique, the company also devotes itself to the professional development of several Canadian artists.
Groupe CH also holds a major stake in the activities of Groupe Juste pour rire, which organizes the biggest comedy festival in the world every year. The festival Juste pour rire/Just for Laughs Festival is internationally renowned in the French and English comedy markets.
I will begin with a bit of background.
Concert ticket sales practices have evolved since the beginning of the digital era. Exclusive presales are often offered to the artist's digital community, to some credit card holders, or to the subscribers of certain newsletters.
For instance, evenko provides exclusive offers of $20 tickets to the subscribers of its newsletter during national concert week. Subscribers of the Festival international de Jazz de Montréal newsletter also receive special offers for the indoor concert series. Digital ticketing systems have also evolved in leaps and bounds over the last few years thanks to the innovations of technological providers, who have equipped their platforms with digital waiting lists and anti-fraud mechanisms to block bots. Generally, the scope of Groupe CH's activities allows us to work with reliable ticketing partners, who are able to invest important sums in anti-fraud research and development.
I will now share our findings with you. All these advances have made it possible to increase Canadians' access to their favourite artists. In Quebec, the access of citizens to live entertainment has notably been increased by the strengthening of the provincial Consumer Protection Act in 2011 and 2018. The company supported the additions to this new law completed in 2018 and is happy about its underlying egalitarian motivation. However, its enforcement relies on limited government resources, which deserve to be improved.
In order to comply with that law, Quebec ticket resellers must ask for producers' permission to resell tickets on their platform. However, these platforms can create confusion among buyers, by often mimicking the visual look of the original ticketing service. They hinder consumers' search for information by sometimes even appearing before authorized vendors in search engine results. The high prices displayed by these resellers may undermine the trust of Canadians towards their entertainment industry, while also affecting artists, potentially hurt by their fans' inability to find tickets at a fair price.
It is important for us that Canadians have simple, efficient access to live artistic performances. Concert tickets are experiential consumer goods that give access to unique irreplaceable entertainment. We encourage Canadians to always purchase concert tickets from the official source, which allows them to avoid fraud risks. Our company directly makes available to the public a large percentage of concert tickets via our official box office. Limited quantities must still be contractually reserved for the artist's entourage or other artistic partners. When those tickets aren't used, they are sometimes put up for sale to the public.
We care about the complete experience of consumers, which should be enjoyable from the purchase of tickets to the end of the performance. However, the great popularity of some artists implies that some shows can sell out very quickly. Financial and logistic considerations limit the number of performances that can be produced, even when demand is overwhelming for a popular artist.
The problem of ticket resale at inflated prices is also fuelled by fraud. Some resellers manage to bypass the anti-fraud protection mechanisms to purchase batches of tickets that are then resold for profit, with the help of bots. The latter cause inconvenience to our ticketing systems, despite the technological measures implemented by our partners.
We are also regularly faced with ticket counterfeiting, which causes distress to some consumers when they arrive at the venue with unusable fake tickets. These swindled buyers are under the wrongful impression that they got them from an authorized vendor. In reality, they were fooled by individuals or platforms that didn't clearly display their reseller status. This kind of a situation directly damages our reputation, by using our brand and our credibility for the wrong purposes. We actively collaborate with the police when such cases are discovered.
In light of our findings, here are our proposals.
First, we encourage governments to use every measure at their disposal to guarantee that Canadians can primarily deal with the official vendor of an artistic performance. Furthermore, the official point of resale should always come up first in search engine results.
Second, since denial of admission at a venue caused by fraud causes dissatisfaction and frustration for Canadians, we encourage all secondary resale platforms to adopt a full refund policy.
Third, we prompt governments to crack down on cases of fraud. This includes ticket counterfeiting and transactions with bots. If the identity of the owners of resale websites were more widely disclosed, it would certainly be easier for the police and courts to crack down on fraud.
Last, we want resale platforms to clearly indicate that they are not the original ticket source.
Thank you very much. I am available to answer any questions you may have, in English or in French.