MP Mike Morrice is sponsoring a petition started by a Taylor Swift fan in Kitchener that aims to get the federal government to impose stronger protections against resale ticket prices in Canada. The petition is in response to the recent drastic increase in ticket resale prices for the well-known Taylor Swift Eras Tour. Melanie Hains, the Kitchener resident who initiated the petition, said that one Toronto resale ticket would have covered the cost of flying her family out to Europe to see the concert there instead.

This large difference between prices in Toronto and Europe is due to the difference in regulations on resale ticket prices in other countries that are noticeably lacking in Canada. It was this lack of protections that ultimately encouraged Mike Morrice to sponsor the petition. “Knowing there are stronger protections in other countries around the world, this seemed like an opportunity to take Melanie’s concern and their experience and that of many others in our community and bring that to Ottawa and this call for the federal government to act,” Morrice said. 

Morrice is urging the government to look to countries such as Portugal, Denmark, and France as a standard for what Canada’s regulations should look like. In countries such as these, there are requirements to ensure that tickets are not resold for more than the face value of the original ticket. In France, a person can be fined upwards of 30,000 euros for attempting to take advantage of buyers by increasing the price of tickets they are reselling. 

These extremely high ticket prices have been impacting people across Canada, including the Taylor Swift fan community here at UW. Students have been forced to either miss out on the Eras tour experience due to the prices or spend upwards of $1000 per ticket to attend the show if they didn’t luck out on Ticketmaster. 

Tiffany Chan, a fifth-year student at UW, made many attempts to purchase tickets for the show and saw firsthand how high the prices could get on ticket resale sites such as StubHub. Chan described how trying to receive a pre-sale code, accessing the site as soon as tickets become available, waiting in line and then trying to check out with tickets on Ticketmaster is why so many people resort to buying resale tickets on alternate sites. Many of the resale tickets are priced at almost $4,000 even for seats in the 500 section of the venue (which is classified as an “obstructed view.”) These same seats on Ticketmaster could go for as low as $550, said Chan. 

While Chan ended up finding last-minute tickets on Ticketmaster, she explained how if she hadn’t, she would have been willing to buy the resale tickets. Yet, she also expressed her frustration at the fact that seeing an artist she likes and appreciates means she has to drain her bank account. “I think people should be singing [the petition] because I think there’s only positive effects for the fans because I feel like we should be able to afford seeing someone that we admire and respect and someone who has just been there for our whole life not at five times the ticketed price,” she said. 

The petition is available to sign until Dec. 20 and requires at least 500 signatures to be brought before the federal government.