Ont. ticket price cap hard to enforce, could send fans to informal markets: experts

TORONTO — 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, the fraud rate for concerts is around 14 per cent and for sporting events it’s almost 11 per cent, found a March 2025 study reseller StubHub commissioned Bradshaw Advisory to conduct.

While the research didn’t track what the fraud rates were before the cap, it uses the U.K., which had no cap at that time, as a comparison. The overall ticket fraud rate was about 3.8 per cent in the U.K., but 13.6 per cent in Ireland.

When resellers are hit with caps, Clement said, they move off ticket platforms that often offer guarantees of a refund or different ticket if there’s a problem with the seat you bought.

Instead, they shift to selling tickets where they can get a higher price: through informal online channels or outside stadiums, where sellers are hard to trace or hold accountable when something goes wrong.

For the province’s cap to be enforceable, authorities would need to patrol outside arenas and sites like Kijiji, Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace.

“One, that is just a completely silly misuse of law enforcement resources and two, it’s entirely impractical,” Clement said.

The cap is also unenforceable because the government hasn’t promised a mechanism to compel Ticketmaster or other box offices to share the original purchase price of a ticket with resellers, said Brian Berry, executive director of Ticket Policy Forum, a group representing ticket resale firms StubHub, Seatgeek, TickPick, GameTime and more.

Without a way to know the original price of every ticket, resale marketplaces will have no reliable way to determine how much a buyer paid and thus, wouldn’t be able to impose a cap, he said.

Catherine Moore, an adjunct University of Toronto professor specializing in the music business, pointed out the cap is also limited because Friday’s announcement said it would apply to anyone who resells a ticket and to any platform that facilitates a resale to events in Ontario.

“It might not be enforceable if the resale happens outside of Ontario,” she said.

And if anyone is caught within the cap’s jurisdiction, the up to $10,000 fine the government is pitching may not be much of a deterrent either, said Moore.

“For the level of profit that secondary ticketing businesses make — whether it’s big established businesses like StubHub or Ticketmaster’s secondary platform or whether it’s smaller brokers — that probably is pretty meaningless for them,” she said.

Moore, Clement and Berry also all believe companies could decide to increase the face value of tickets to make up for not being able to resell seats later for several times the price.

“Make no mistake: under this proposal, ticket prices will continue to rise and scams will increase,” Berry said.

Ontario’s move toward a cap comes months before the World Cup will be hosted partially in Canada and in advance of major tours from BTS, Bruno Mars, Rush and Hilary Duff.

While the rising price of concert and sports tickets has been topical for years, it was the World Series that put the issue on Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s radar. The Toronto Blue Jays’ run to the finals over the fall had resale prices soaring to exorbitant levels most fans couldn’t stomach and spurred Ford.

But Vass Bednar, co-author of “The Big Fix: How Companies Capture Markets and Harm Canadians,” pointed out Ford was also the one to scrap a law from the Liberals in government before him. It would have capped ticket resale prices at 50 per cent above the original face value.

In the meantime, other jurisdictions bounded ahead. The U.K. tabled legislation last year that would make it illegal to resell tickets above face value.

“So while Ontario seems like a leader in a federalism context, it’s kind of a follower in terms of an international policy domino context,” Bednar said.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 20, 2026.

Tara Deschamps, The Canadian Press