Ontario’s controversial ticket resale price cap is moving closer to becoming law, with Bill 97 — the province’s omnibus budget measure — now at third reading following debate on April 22 and a deferred vote on final passage listed on the Legislature’s April 23 orders paper.
The bill includes amendments to the province’s 2017 Ticket Sales Act which would prohibit secondary-market ticket sales above the total price originally paid to the primary seller, plus applicable fees, service charges, and taxes.
Ticketmaster is complying with Ontario’s Bill 97 to cap resale ticket prices in Ontario effective April 23, 2026.
Ontarians who currently have tickets listed for resale within Ticketmaster’s secondary marketplace have reportedly received an email saying their listings will be removed in light of the fresh provincial legal requirements.
According to various screenshots that have circulated on social media, the email reads, “Effective April 23, 2026, tickets in Ontario cannot be resold above the total original cost, including service fees and taxes.”
It continues, “Beginning next week, you will be able to relist your tickets in compliance with Ontario’s new legal requirements once updates have been made to our resale marketplace.”
Critics argue the proposal is advancing rapidly and with limited scrutiny despite warnings that resale price caps could harm consumers, undermine regulated marketplaces, and further entrench the power of dominant primary ticketing companies.
That looming advance has sparked a renewed wave of criticism from consumer-side opponents of resale caps, led by Sports Fans Coalition, which says more than 10,000 Ontarians have contacted Premier Doug Ford and their Members of Provincial Parliament urging the government to strip the ticketing provisions from the budget bill.
In a release issued April 23, the group said the measure is being pushed ahead “with no debate” at the committee stage and warned that the policy would do more to constrain compliant resale marketplaces than to restrain dominant primary ticketing players.
Advertisement “Over 10,000 Ontarians have taken action, throwing a penalty flag on the Government’s ticket price cap proposal,” Sports Fans Coalition executive director Brian Hess said in the release. “As the Premier pushes this legislation through without any public conversation, we are making sure that fan voices are heard loud and clear, imploring Premier Ford: don’t fumble our tickets by passing price caps.”
The legislative vehicle itself has become a focal point of the criticism.
Another significant criticism is that the resale price cap is packaged as Schedule 16 of a wider bill, which also moves to rewrite the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (FIPPA), ending public access to political officials’ records to retroactively create Ford, cabinet ministers, parliamentary assistants and their staff exempt from FOI requests.
As per TicketNews, critics of Bill 97 have argued that capping resale prices could actually harm consumers by undermining regulated marketplaces and further entrenching such aforementioned dominance. As the publication’s Dave Clark points out, the new legislation will also require secondary sellers to provide proof of original price when listing a ticket for sale, as well as mandating disclosure of original and resale prices to buyers, compelling secondary market platforms to retain records for a minimum of three years after the event.
Ticketmaster will also presumably be under more pressure than ever to be accommodating to state-level changes, with a New York federal jury having just found its parent company Live Nation guilty of engaging in monopolistic practices in the live event industry.
If you’ve ever resold a ticket on Ticketmaster, you’ll understand that you have to up-charge potential buyers due to the cut that the ticketing platform takes in the transaction if you even want to break even.
It remains to be seen how Ticketmaster’s own policies will be integrated into the new Ontario legislation, and whether they’ll be the ones recouping the service fees or the seller.
That said, it’s hard to argue that this isn’t at least somewhat of a win in an extremely broken pandemic-era secondary market economy, wherein scalpers and their exorbitant mark-ups remain very much at large.
Case in point: the news about the Harry Styles tour that came out yesterday, where thousands of tickets were recovered from scalpers to be re-sold to fans.
One could say that many remarkable things happened during last year’s MLB World Series — and Doug Ford suddenly deciding that Ticketmaster is “gouging” people after killing a bill to cap resale prices in 2019 was certainly among them.
Perhaps I’m too cynical (and who can blame me), but I didn’t really think much would come of it. Nevertheless, Bill 97 persists, and today has seen a landmark moment in its movement to amend 2017’s Ticket Sales Act: Ticketmaster will be complying with its efforts to limit exorbitant mark-ups on secondary market ticket sales.