Ontario Premier Doug Ford criticizes World Series ticket ‘gouging’
I mean, ON had a cap on ticket resale prices that Dougie boy scrapped. Look in the mirror man.
Self reflection from a Ford? lol. lmao even.
It would just break the mirror, alas
The mirror’s got some white stuff on it.
Maybe he was in a drunken stupor?
Wrong brother.
Same parents.
Fair.
Never in my life
Maybe he’ll do the old silently create a problem and then publicly announce a solution.
Ford is a bozo and a crook.
Lol doug ford has always been a plague on toronto.
I could’ve sworn this guy died years ago.
that was his brother Rob, aka the crack addict former mayor of Toronto
Oddly enough the crackhead was the better politician
God I miss him. He was so fucking funny.
I miss Chris Farley cause he woulda done great a Rob Ford.
My Dad’s the Mayor
ookay THANK YOU that had been lowkey bugging me for a while and I was always too lazy to look it up lol.
Dude changed some rules so speed cameras could be used in Ontario. Then when his friends and kids started getting tickets he started railing against speed cameras and how horrible they are. Now he is trying to ban them and say how great he is for getting rid of them.
And Tommy Two Tooth in butt-fuck no where will love that he’s “sticking it Toronto” and vote him in again.
Just like how he got rid of the combined TTC+GO fare put in by Wynne, then brought it back a couple years ago and took credit for it. It’s part of his playbook.
Same thing with his missing link proposal for transit. Idiot killed it day 1 of his first term and then in 2025 was like “oh shit yeah we should look into that”
It’s almost like he has no idea what he’s doing and doesn’t understand how to plan for the future.
He knows exactly what he’s doing. He wins elections by erasing solutions to problems and then “fixing” them years later when people have forgotten.
He doesn’t know shit. The LPC and NDP provincially are a mess.
He knows how to win elections by taking advantage of how dramatized politics has become and people’s general ignorance of his policies.
I’m not saying I like the guy. You’re right, the left parties really need to get their shit together.
He’s gonna complain next week that Toronto needs more bike lanes for cyclists.
r/LeopardsAteMyFace
We all got fucked, not just him fucking himself, he fucked all of us. Now we can’t go to concerts and shit in Toronto anymore.
we’re all trying to find the guy who did this
Just add it to the list of things that Doug’s government changed and now he’s mad about.
Same guy that passed legislation allowing speed cameras and is now trying to ban them after a bunch of OPC MPP’s racked up multiple speeding tickets in government vehicles?
Curious, was he lobbied for this change?
Depends, was there a rep for Ticketmaster or StubHub at his daughter’s wedding?
This needs to be big time news.
But now he gets to turn around and propose a cap on ticket resale. His rube voters won’t remember the one he got rid of and give him all the credit
The Ford family hates mirrors
…why does a Phillies fan know this?
Because she lives in Ottawa.
Fascinating
He’s virtue signalling and playing it up to the people too dumb to know this.
It’s his fault that they’re able to gouge by this much. He literally adjusted a law which partially protected the gouging when he became premier Lmaoo
We’re all trying to find the guy who did this!
I’m positive he’s at his limit
I think the stupider group here is the voters who voted for him again. Y’all asked for this
He got 43% of the votes and about 46% of the votes went to the left of him. But fptp and his party being the only right wing one is a big reason he keeps winning.
Also nobody in Ontario votes. Only 45% of eligible voters voted in the last election.
I get voter apathy. My vote never matters as I live in the country and conservatives win no matter what. I still vote but it is shitty knowing my vote will never matter. Fptp sucks.
I live in a riding where the Conservative MPP is related to a popular former Conservative politician. I vote but it’s completely meaningless outside of supporting the philosophy that everyone should vote
I vote but I understand why others don’t given no opposition party seems to do anything to promote themselves in Ontario politics
It is mind boggling how bad the other parties are at appealing to their voters.
That stupider group is like the entire province outside of core Toronto, Ottawa, London, and Hamilton. The peabrained suburbanites and rural voters can get bribed with like $200, slightly easier access to alcohol, and promises of more worthless car-focused infrastructure. Also a lot of them actually revel in Doug Ford actively fucking over Toronto.
Don’t lump Kingston in with the rest of them.
Nobody showed up again in Ontario to vote him out even though he’s very unpopular. I don’t know a single person who likes him, even Conservatives. The voter apathy is infuriating.
It also doesn’t help the that Liberals and NDP are putting forward candidates with as much charisma as a wet sponge
Please tell me someone in the media asked about that
They did. He deflected the question like Prime Patrick Roy. It’s the one skill he has as a politician.
Fuck this clown. He’s the one who scrapped the previous attempt to cap resale ticket prices years ago so this is just more of his usual performative bullshit.
That old cap also didn’t go far enough. It capped it at 50%, but imo the cap should be face value. Buying tickets and then selling them at a markup should not be a legitimate business.
I think 10% is fair. There is a legit reason to want or need to resell a ticket and that service can cost money. 10% over face is probably not a big deal.
Surely if you’ve got a legit reason to want to resell a ticket you’ve bought then you’d just be happy to make your money back.
Frankly I’d go one further and ban fees entirely and make the price you see the price you pay. There’s no reason to charge a delivery fee for a QR code. But we probably just end up back at your argument at that point.
If there are 500,000 people willing to buy face value tickets, how do you sell 40,000 tickets at face value?
Do the tickets just go to whoever can create the most bots?
And what’s stopping someone from buying one of these below market value tickets and then selling on the grey market?
No it’s actually random then, nobody would have incentive to create bots if they can’t sell at a higher rate.
I know a dude named Dave who wants to go and will pay $700 (or whatever buyers are currently paying)
I have a huge incentive to buy cheap tickets and getting them to Dave. In thus hypothetical a trivial amount of work could make me $600 lol
Yes but if selling that ticket to Dave for anything more than Dave value were illegal, you’d have a lot fewer people interested in providing that service.
That involves you needing to know someone willing to pay who also can’t just get the tickets from someone else online who isn’t price gouging. A lot more effort and connections needed. Scalpers will still create a black market but it will make it easier for most to get affordable tickets
The issue is there wouldn’t be any non-“price gouged” tickets
If people are willing to pay $700 for a WS game then there will never be a substantial supply of face value tickets
I can see how you might think that, but we have empirical proof from many big artists who worked with Ticketmaster to prevent price gouging from scalpers. I was able to buy Fred again.. tickets for list price 5 days before the concert from resellers because you can’t re-sell for more than list price. Sure there were some Stubhub tickets that sent you to weird sites like securemypass.com to scan your tickets, but they successfully curbed gouging to the point the scalpers on Stubhub were forced to sell at a loss. It can easily work, and we’ve seen it work many times
At risk of sounding ignorant… I’ve never heard of Fred Again and wonder if comparing to Toronto’s only 2-4 WS games in the past 30 years is really fair
That’s just one example, and he’s big enough for sold out world arena tours and major festival headliners so I’d say he’s quite big. The point is that if you cap the prices, it will work, and we have good examples of it working. At least we have much better real world data than just thought experiments
At euros last year you had to buy tickets through the euros app. If you wanted to resell because you couldn’t go, you could list them back on the app, but only for face value. Immediately the secondary (i.e. scalpers) market is gone, and the only people buying tickets are people who will go to the match. That is how it should be everywhere.
How does that stop them from selling on another site though. Can’t you sell them on ebay or whatever and then just say you’ll transfer them to the buyer.
Ticketmaster can do this for concerts. The Cure are always mentioned when concert ticket price discussions come up. The tickets cannot be relisted on any other sites. They are in your Ticketmaster account, and if you have to get rid of them, you can only relist them on Ticketmaster’s resale site, and then they cannot be sold above face value. They were non-transferrable.
Scalpers were practically shut out on the last tour for The Cure, and they actually made the most money in the band’s history on the sold out tour. They even priced their tickets “fairly” and much lower than other touring acts. They actually showed that they cared about their fans.
If the ticket platform doesn’t have transfers for the event then that cuts that off. I’ve used platforms where you can’t export the ticket or that blocked transfers outside of certain windows. They could just turn transfers off.
Is it possible to get around it by selling the login to the ticket site?
The place I went checked ID and last I remember apps usually don’t allow you to change you name on them after creation but in theory you could do all of that and I guess have to keep rolling new accounts but atp you’ve already introduced plenty of friction for mass resellers.
There’s no real culture of ticket exchanges in Europe in the same way. People would be wary that they’d be scammed on eBay.
It does happen, it’s just way less of a thing.
Fine, but then only way to get tickets will be via the F5 lottery
How about a loyalty system? The more games you’ve been to, the higher in the hierarchy you are for dibs on tickets to the big games.
This is exactly what happens in the UK and works perfectly.
I wonder how many initial buyers sold their tickets back via the official platform rather than selling them P2P on the grey market…
Most secondary ticket sales require you to have a way to transfer the ticket. If the platform doesn’t allow that then you can cut off grey market sales. You can also have ID checks for the name registered to the ticket.
Maybe I’m too progressive but I don’t think IDs should be required for voting or for attending events
I can see some of why but for major events it turns into a security issue. For voting, I think the issue is that IDs should be free so it’s not a cost problem. Otherwise yeah you do need to verify the correct person is voting and someone isn’t voting multiple times which requires some form of verification.
This black market/grey market argument is bandied about a lot as a defense of official ticket exchanges, but believe me when I say that in the UK, in the absence of licensed exchanges, secondary market tickets were barely a thing, and even now remain MUCH less of a thing than in North America.
Combine that with the fact that most sports teams have a loyalty system to guarantee that tickets end up in the hands of people who most deserve them, rather than the highest bidders.
Lottery like how wimbledon does it.
I’m OOTL, there’s no secondary ticket market for Wimbledon?
Not unless you get a hospitality suite. Tickets are done by lottery or you camp out two days before the day you want to see.
Well you raise a very important economic point. Should we follow straight supply and demand curves for “entertainment” or should there be some sort of thing to level the playing field? I actually don’t know the answer, I think what makes it feel unfair is people buying them just to resell them and not, oh damn I actually can’t make this game.
Realistically, you probably need government intervention because in this case the slippery slope argument does hold some water, at what point do we say price gouging is acceptable vs when it hurts the fabric of society?
I think in the case of Canada’s only baseball team there probably should be an emphasis on making sure season ticket holders have a good crack at it first. Followed by a queue and ticket purchase that is tied to a name of a real person that the name is on the ticket itself, essentially banning resale. (People would still be able to program bots) But then the buyer should be able to return it to the team for a full refund so the team can try and sell it again. Another option is a lottery system with real people, once again the name on the lottery has to match the person actually attending. Or just cap resale like the original policy to 20-30%. That is a fair margin for someone to make.
The other option is for the Jays to charge even more on the face value to flatten that supply and demand curve. That will reduce the amount of profit a reseller can make because there is a set theoretical equilibrium price. If someone is willing to pay $5000 why doesn’t the Jays just charge it straight up?
I mostly agree with you.
I just don’t think an artificial cap only on entertainment works or makes sense
I would love if the government/economic systems were changed so Person A gets Taylor Swift tickets, Person B gets WS tickets, Person C gets a dinner at a 5 star restaurant, and Person D gets a 2002 Camaro.
Although the cappers have good intentions, I think they miss the fact that people are willing to pay supply/demand prices.
I do agree the artist/team should charge more if they know the tickets will be in high demand
why doesn’t the Jays just charge it straight up?
I think it’s because it damages their long-term viability as a mass-market product if people think it’s available exclusively to the megarich.
I wish people got worked up about ticket prices here like they do in Europe. Like if a team tries to raise ticket prices by a significant amount there the fans practically riot lol.
Fuckin eh
You have to mark it up enough to pay Ticketmaster a second time and recoup your money.
Why do tickets need special protections compared to any other product? What’s so special about event tickets that requires government regulation?
Plenty of industries and products are regulated. The question is why the ticket industry shouldn’t be, considering how scalping and unfair business practices on the part of Ticketmaster have grossly inflated ticket values and made those mediums of entertainment increasingly inaccessible to all but the wealthiest in society.
As I stated before, not everything needs to be a money making opportunity.
Human nature is always going to turn something into a money making opportunity when a lot of people want something that is very little and while we regulate for life essentials like food, shelter, medicine, etc. I think it’s overreach to say we need to do that for tickets to live entertainment events. I can get behind legislating against hidden fees and deceptive marketing-sales but any sort of regulation of ticket prices ultimately amounts to ridiculous attempts at “fairness” when it should just be left alone.
That would make it very hard for people to get tickets.
I’m waiting for him to stand at a podium and rip up some fake World Series tickets.
Ford, later dressed in a hot dog costume, insisted, “We’re all trying to find the guy who did this.”
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ndp-mpps-ticket-prices-taylor-swift-concert-1.7391180
Fuck Doug Ford
Rather not do that
https://www.thebeaverton.com/2025/10/ford-blames-jays-playoff-ticket-gouging-on-asshole-premier-who-scrapped-ticketmaster-law-in-2019/
It’s crazy that that title isn’t even really satire
It’s sad that it’s more truthful framing than how our actual media’s reporting on it.
The actual Ticketmaster prices were reasonable
Fuck the resellers
Ford was the one to scrap the anti-scalping law a few years ago. The current reseller situation is literally his fault.
$345 for no seats tickets is not reasonable
For the most in demand baseball game in 30 years?
To put it in perspective, the Leafs charge $250 for a regular season game.
But at least at a home leafs game you get to see Jack Hughes get a hat trick 🤷♂️
Nobody cares about the leafs right now that 100s tickets were $60 last night
I would pay 345$ to see Ohtani pitch and hit bombs though lol
Holy shit
Standing room is \(345 face value? Holy shit. They’re reselling for \)805.
Some shithead in r/jaystickets was trying to immediately flip their standing tickets for 1500 a piece
Disgusting behavior
I paid $1058 for two tickets in section 514 for game six
$500 after fees for a potential World Series clinching game seemed fair to me, but I’m not sure I would pay that for standing room
(I’m also from Buffalo so they were more like $380 USD)
It’s funny how a “reasonable” price is whatever you’re willing to pay and it’s “price gouging” when the price is higher than what you’re personally willing to pay lol
Is it reasonable that resellers can use bots to scoop up face value prices and immediately resell them at inflated values?
Nope, meaning they should increase ticket prices and/or only have them available for season ticket holders
As if you are asking for Rogers to charge people more
when the price is higher than what you’re personally willing to pay lol
Not everyone funds their recreational budget off antisocial ticket flipping. Some people actually have to work for their money and find purpose in life other than to scam everyone they can get their hands on.
That’s not the issue at all
Resellers who flip to make a profit with no intention of attending the event shouldn’t be allowed
I hope you can see the difference
Would you rather have the ability to pay $1000 for 2 ALCS tickets or have them only available in a grey market where bots scoop up the artificially capped tickets?
Also, that’s single seat face value price. If you have season tickets or quarter pack of season tickets, which many do have, it was only like $250 a ticket in the 500s. And you got access to buy 2 games worth on the quarter pack of tickets.
It’s about 3-4 times more now.
Tickets for the 100 level at the Skydome,93 world series cost 72 bucks after tax and no service fees . 140.46 bucks in today’s money.
I paid $488 for Level 100 seats for Game #1 of WS. That’s the Season Ticket price. A good chunk of the seats are extremely affordable. Like most sports, its the single game tickets that start to get inflated.
Personally, face value for season tickets for great lower bowl seats for the WS at $488 (CDN) is a steal.
It’s the World Series
My tinfoil hat theory is that ticketmaster is the bulk of the resellers
It’s not the resellers. It’s the team for selling tickets for way less than people are willing to pay
That call is coming from inside the house, Doug.
Limit purchase to four tickets per name/address and limit sales to four tickets per bank account/card number.
I actually don’t think it’s a good idea for all ticket selling sites to have a comprehensive and up to date census of all citizens and their addresses
Palantir is salivating at the idea though
The same ticket selling websites already take in your information, that said information gets cross checked across their existing customer database…which they already have and utilize for ticket offers. Nothing changes, except your ticket scalping business
Families of 5+ in shambles
It’s easier, just cap resale price to like 10% above face value.
This summer I was going to check out a Billy Strings concert, something he did for his tickets which I was shocked by and actually amazed at the intelligence of, is e-deliver tickets like 24 hours before the event to eliminate scalping. When you think about it, if eliminating resale is what the goal is, it takes care of most of it with just a delay in the electronic delivery. Not opposed to a cap either
The problem is that artists and blue jays get a kick back from resale sites so they have no incentive to stop it.
Just prohibit reselling like airline tickets.
If you prohibit reselling then you need to force venues to offer refunds - which I am not against. But I think you are going to get a lot of pushback or refusal to promote events/shows/concerts if that occurs.
Every cancelled concert/game I bought tickets for have been refunded, or given 120% credit. If you meant just refunding because you no longer feel like going, even airlines don’t allow that without increased fees
I would say that buying concert tickets or sporting tickets are a significant less societal commitment than an airplane ticket. I.e. you are likely to book vacation days for a airline ticket, whereas sports/concerts would generally be considered an after-work/social commitment.
Therefore I would say that the barrier required to not go to a show/sport is lower than a trip and it is more likely that a work/social/family commitment is more likely to occur and it is more reasonable to expect a refund for a show/sports.
I think it is reasonable to expect that venues are either required to accept refunds, or reselling needs to be permitted - because of the lower societal commitment - but reselling should be limited to like 10% above face value to fund the reselling site and limit scalping. Even if the venu offered the resell tickets directly for the 10% increase - I am ok with that. Say its a 100 ticket and you can score a last minute ticket for only \(110, I am just happy I can go. The \)10 isn’t significant - its not $1000 resell.
I don’t mind a 10% cap or something like that, but I totally disagree about returns being tied to societal commitments. Most dollar stores have no refund policies and that’s a much lower commitment. Even for events, many concerts or shows on Eventbrite don’t allow refunds and have no way of reselling either. I think refunds are just a perk that big companies decided is worth the hassle for customer satisfaction, hence most mom & pop shops or small shows not having it
No you don’t. Just like airlines don’t have to offer refunds.
You buy a ticket and you go, or tough luck.
I don’t know much about Canada law, only bird law.
Fantastic comment 👍
It’s just a reference to Reddit’s favourite show and has nothing to do with the topic. Peak Reddit.
No no, I’m aware of the reference, I was just showing my appreciation for the reference
I wanted two tickets, but when I got in I ended up buying four. I knew I’d know people who really wanted to go but got locked out, so I’m selling the ones I don’t need to friends at face value. Figured whoever I sell the tickets to will be sitting next to me, and I wanna be sitting next to real fans.
That’s nice of you. Back in 2015, my brother got a bunch of tickets but wouldn’t sell me one - he resold them for a profit.
Damn that must hurt.
He’s a populist. But he doesn’t actually care about helping anybody.
Shut up Doug – pretty sure you will be at the games on the taxpayer dime along with Carney. Want to do something useful? How about creating more jobs and reducing taxes? PS – Thank you for destroying two essential memories of my childhood (Ontario Place & Ontario Science Centre).
First time?
The gouging is one thing the bigger offence to me is the 2 thousand dollar ticket fees. That’s something that seems much easier to regulate than how much people resell for.
Tell you fat cat friends to give theirs up then Dougie
Just attach the ticket it to a piece of ID like drivers license with proof of address.
“Doug Ford once again spends his entire day trying to seem like the average guy who you should totally vote for”
This bowling ball is turning into the orange idiot. The bravado is something else.
I got enough to eat at home . I know wrong ford but still
You’ve had three straight majorities doofus. You could fix this tomorrow.
If only we had a law to prevent such things eh, eh Doug? Hmmmmmm
I wonder if Doug got tickets? Probably.
Another fake outcry, just to try to look good.
Isn’t this the same that had that cocaine scandal that became a Netflix documentary?
That was his brother Rob, the former Toronto mayor who died in 2016.
Nah, that was the fun brother Rob
“I’ve got plenty to eat at home”
Never forget that shit 💀
The reporters all just looked at each stunned before laughing, lol
That was his dead brother, Rob, former mayor.
It was his brother and it was crack. Tons and tons of crack with the full assortment of different kinds of crackheads.
This brother is the one that was a hash dealer in high school.
I posted something similar on the MLB sub and they removed it
Most likely he tried to buy tickets and he saw the prices 😆
Streisand effect this king koopa
I thought Ontario was open for business…….
Wait is he mad at the oligopoly for gouging or is he mad at the monopoly for gouging?
500-level seats are $2000 from the box office.
It’s fucking absurd.
No they weren’t. I got tickets for game 1. 500 level were 425 I think. I bought in 139 for 1000 face value.
I think people with season tickets were able to get the same tickets for 425 though but I’m not 100% sure on that.
The call is coming from inside this UNTOUCHED building:
Thought this dude OD’d a few years back.
He’s also going to hunt down the corrupt people in charge of the Green Belt scan…I mean the ones in charge of the Ontario Pla…Tunnels! Tunnels everywhere!
Wasn’t Doug Ford that dude who was smoking crack while in office?
No that was his brother Rob. Rob is dead.
Jeff, and Torontonians look at that and say “let’s get the crackhead’s brother to be our next major”
He’s gonna spend so much tax money finding out who allowed this! (And you’re all thinking Rob Ford)
wonder whose fault that is. a real mystery.
It’s a hot ticket.
What is the difference between gouging and setting prices in accordance with supply and demand?
Even assuming that concern glossed over, this is world series tickets, not electricity, food or water. Get a grip
You may not like him but he’s better than anything running sadly.