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Bill 18 - Film and Video Classification Act

October 28, 2008 - Second Reading

Ms Blakeman: Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker. I believe I’m the second speaker on this bill.

The Speaker: You are.

Ms Blakeman: I am? Excellent. Thank you. That’s appropriate because I am the critic for the department that’s sponsoring this bill.

The Speaker: That also provides you with 20 minutes.

Ms Blakeman: Thank you.

The Speaker: Unchallenged.

Ms Blakeman: Thank you. This was the second bill coming from a department that I was critic for that has gone through a policy field committee. The previous one was last year, with the mental health bill. That process didn’t work as well as we’d hoped, so I made a really conscious effort to attend as regularly as possible and to review all of the Hansard from any policy field committee that had a bill in front of it that I would be responsible for as critic, which meant that I spent my summer attending three different policy field committees.

I think that the idea or the hope that the government had was that a lot of the discussion that the opposition members bring to the floor around bills would in fact happen in the policy field committee, and they could dispense with the extra time here in the Legislative Assembly. I have never subscribed to that, but I was certainly willing to attend the meetings and do my homework and try and raise the issues that I thought needed discussion in the policy field committees.

I have to say that this was not a happy experience for me at all. It was very difficult to get the information about when the actual meetings were called because I was not assigned to that particular committee, and the administration insisted that I had to work through one of my colleagues who was assigned to the committee. Over the summer people are on holidays and they are away from their computers and may not be checking things, so it was really a cumbersome process for me to try and work through as a critic, to do what I thought was wanted and expected of me, in fact. It was difficult to find out when the meetings were scheduled. Of course, they were sometimes scheduled at times when I absolutely couldn’t be there, and I would try and reorganize things.

To get the information: that at times was really critical. I understand that the staff for the policy committees felt they were very pressed and that they had a great deal on their plate, but we would end up with things being posted online at 4:35 or 4:25. The office staff that was supporting the MLA, you know, may have left the office at 4:30 and therefore didn’t see it on the website, or when they checked on the website before they left, it wasn’t there, and they leave and they’ve gone for the weekend and I couldn’t get the damn information until the meeting. I walked into a lot of those meetings without getting the information off the website.

Now, according to what I heard the House leader say this morning, this is supposed to be addressed, that all members are to be given notice of all meetings and that we should all be able to have access to the information that’s on the website, which would be an enormous help.

What happened to me was that I spent a lot of time and effort on a particular issue that was affecting a lot of constituents, who had contacted me about it. I brought a motion forward. We debated it. We accepted it. A final report was produced. I went to the final meeting, and a member who had not attended all the meetings came in and repealed my motion, put his own in place, and that’s what you see before you in the report. You know, I know the government has got 72 members. I know they can get everything they want through a majority vote, but, man, that is – well, I don’t want to swear, Mr. Speaker, and you don’t want me to swear.

The Speaker: Please don’t.

Ms Blakeman: That was a great disappointment to me if I could put it that way, and it, I think, was reflective of how non all-party these policy field committees really are. Essentially, we’re allowed to show up, do a bunch of work, but it doesn’t matter because it’s not going to make it into anything. So I’m going to use my time here in the Assembly to talk about the issues that I thought were important around this bill.

The Speaker: That’s actually the purpose of second reading.

Ms Blakeman: Indeed, Mr. Speaker.

The Speaker: That would be really good if we could focus. Perfect.

Ms Blakeman: But this is a bill that came through the policy field committee, and I felt you all needed to understand that process.

The Speaker: Okay. You now have 15 minutes to go.

Ms Blakeman: Thank you so much, Mr. Speaker, for your coaching. I don’t know what I would do without it. Maybe have more time.

What we have in front of us is Bill 18. That is the Film and Video Classification Act, and it is sponsored directly by the Minister of Culture and Community Spirit. What it is looking to do is repeal the old Amusements Act, which really was archaic legislation using archaic language, where they talked about moving picture houses and things like that. It really was not dealing with the digital age. It was not dealing with the multi, multibillion dollar industry that is film production. It wasn’t dealing with any of the new media that we now have, with things like Xboxes and interactive games and a number of other film representation that can be purchased in different kinds of formats. It’s become much more complicated than was considered in the Amusements Act.

We heard from a number of people. The industry has worked quite hard to police itself, and as much as I am not a fan of self regulation, I understand what the community has done. They walk that line between official censorship and community standards and business, and they try very hard to walk that line. They want to be able to have their product shown in the movie theatres and have people come and pay money to see it. They don’t want to be censored and not to be able to show a movie that they spent a lot of money to make. So they are very conscious of that line they’re walking, and they work hard to do that.

There were a couple of things that were raised as part of the report. There were concerns particularly around redefining certain classifications. The recommendation was to “ensure that the definition of an adult video film is not inadvertently applied to a video film that might be otherwise classified under a different rating.” There was quite a bit of discussion about the age limits and classifications that were in there, where we could end up with a ridiculous situation where the movie theatres couldn’t possibly police a 14-year-old, which was the real point of discussion, because they literally are not issued with any kind of identification. They would be stopping people and saying, “Show us your identification to prove your age” when, in fact, that age group tends not to have identification. So we dealt with the recommendations that came from the sector in that way.

The issue that I was particularly concerned about, Mr. Speaker, was ticket speculation. The old act, the Amusements Act, in Bill 18 appears as section 22, which is the repeal section. It would be wiped out by the proclamation of this particular bill. I was very keen that we do two things. One is to maintain the protection that was available, weak though it is, through the Amusements Act for any kind of ticket – we used to call it ticket scalping. What is happening now is a much more high-tech, modernized version, which we’re calling ticket speculation. Scalping I think most people are familiar with from sporting events.

What’s happening now is happening on a much different level, and here’s where it really affects Albertans and affects constituents that each of us have. In the entertainment and in the performing arts sectors, for most of the performers, musicians, directors, dancers, various other live performers, those behind the scenes, like the designers, but also like the members of IATSE, which is the stagehands union, and other workers who are hired on a casual or temporary basis to provide assistance, building scaffolding to hang lights in the large theatres for example, all of their pay rates are determined by the ticket price and the size of the theatre. It’s called your house category. These are widely accepted across the industry.

What we have happening is that the tickets are being advertised at one rate and sold, many of them online, of course, which people find very useful, and we would want to keep that in place. What’s happening is that we have large numbers of single tickets bought up electronically, so they’re not available for the general public. When they go on the site, it says, “We’re sold out,” but then they get a helpful notice that sends them on to another affiliated group who has, in fact, single tickets for sale, but there is a markup on them. We started to track this through. It started to turn up with rock bands originally, and for those of you that are Metallica fans, this will mean something. If you’re not, let me see if I can come up with another example that we had. [some applause] Oh, we’ve got Metallica fans. Okay. Good.

The tickets were being resold at substantially higher prices, and that was really affecting our constituents who work in technical support in these large venues, so in Rexall Place and in the Jubilee auditoria and in Calgary in the large presenting venue that they have there, but it would also come into play in Jack Singer and some of those other places like that.

These tickets were being resold, and there was an enormous profit being made there, but none of it was being made by our constituents. It was being made by a company that – who knows? – is headquartered somewhere else. The one I looked into is headquartered in Chicago. There is an enormous profit being made here but not by our constituents, and the money is not even staying in our country and circulating in our economy. Really, it’s a situation of our constituents being taken advantage of here because their pay rate is based on those ticket prices. There’s an inflated price that’s out there, but they don’t get any of that, and that to me was very wrong. I would think that as Albertans we would want to protect our constituents and try and get the best deal possible for them.

I was trying to do two things. One was to protect the very frail protection that was available under the old Amusements Act, which basically in section 25 of the act just said under Resale of Admission Ticket that “no person shall sell, barter or exchange a ticket of admission to a place of amusement for a price or consideration greater than that paid or given for it to the owner of the place to which it authorizes admission.” It’s generally accepted in the sector and in the community that nobody was enforcing this. It actually existed. There was a penalty clause that went along with that, section 26, that said that a person who contravenes anything in the act would be “liable to a fine of not more than $200 and in default of payment [of that] to imprisonment for a term not exceeding 6 months.”

It was pretty old and pretty flimsy, and it really hadn’t been enforced with any kind of vigour for a significant period of time. Nonetheless, it was there. What we’re seeing is that there’s been a sort of jump-up for what’s happening to people in the sector. As I looked into this issue across the summer, we had something that was much closer to home, and that was when the Alberta Ballet tickets came up. Alberta Ballet operates in both Edmonton and Calgary, and this brought it a little closer to home than the Metallica band performing at our large concert venues. We tracked that, and a single ticket that would have sold regularly for $40 to an Alberta Ballet production turned up on this secondary ticket seller’s website for $343. That starts to really bring it home to us.

It is the advent of technology. It is the advent of much more money circulating in the community. It is the common usage of the Internet and these kinds of technologies that allows that instant buying of all the single tickets that were available in a given second and the moving of those into these secondary ticket sites that allowed all of this to happen. You know, could this have been in play five years ago? No, Mr. Speaker, probably not. It’s a relatively new development that has highlighted and brought into very sharp focus part of the problem.

A number of people did comment on this as part of the policy field committee, admitted that what we had wasn’t very good but that it was something. The recommendation was that we look at the Ontario Ticket Speculation Act as a way of addressing this. That’s what my motion said, and it got repealed, as I said. But I still think it’s important that we pursue this because this industry is not getting smaller. It’s not slowing down. It’s not about less money. It’s about more of all of those things. I’m quite concerned about the effect on our local cultural industry sector and our cultural workers, and they’re our constituents. They’re our constituents in the cities and in the country. This isn’t just a matter of, you know, some sort of weird artsy-fartsy types in the metropolitan areas. These people come from families from Lacombe and Stettler and Tofield and Fort Macleod and all over. It does affect all of us in the way these people are treated.

The Ticket Speculation Act, that was brought into play in Ontario, defines ticket, and then it basically says that a person who holds a ticket and sells and disposes of it at a higher price than that at which it was first issued or who endeavours to do so or purchases a speculation at a higher price than advertised and resells it is guilty of an offence and on conviction is liable to a fine of not more than $5,000. It gives an exception that this does not apply to a sale on a commission at hotel stands and stores. So if you go to a fancy hotel and there’s a concierge, she will get you a ticket to the Lion King, and if they charge an administrative fee or a commission fee on top of that, it would not apply to that.

I still think it’s important that we do what we can to protect our constituents because this has been identified as something that is really affecting them.

The issues that were raised by the cultural industry sector, by the film sector. They were really concerned that Alberta not do certain things. They were saying: “The system is basically okay. Please don’t get scared and put this in place. Don’t get too excited and put that in place on us.” The committee dealt with all of that. To me the only outstanding issue that flowed from that was the issue of ticket speculation.

Now, I just want to say, Mr. Speaker, that I know people laugh when I talk about others reading Hansard – and I sometimes believe I’m the only person that goes back and reviews things from committees – but interestingly enough I think the companies that are the ticket speculators were reading Hansard. About two days after I raised this issue in that particular committee, in fact, they removed the link between the first and secondary ticket selling sites on the Internet, and they have stayed disconnected now. In talking to some of the people that expressed concerns to me, they think it will probably stay that way until Bill 18 passes, and then they will just start up with fury because there’ll be nothing then to prohibit what they’re doing.

The Fair Trading Act has been brought up to me a number of times as something that protects people, but in fact it doesn’t. I went and got the Fair Trading Act, and I read the section that was being referred to by the department staff that came in to answer this question, and in fact it does the opposite. It says that you can resell, but you’re supposed to tell people the difference in the price. Well, you know, strictly speaking, the secondary ticket seller was doing that, but you didn’t find out what the original price was until you’d already given them your Visa number and they were giving you confirmation at the end. It was in tiny, tiny, tiny print, about four point, on the final page. At that point you could have backed out of it if you wanted to, knowing you were paying $343 for a $40 ticket. So they had obliged the specifics of the Fair Trading Act, but really, I would argue, that was not consumer protection as most people would understand it.

I think there is still work to be done as a result of what’s been presented by the act. I’m happy to support Bill 18 as it is, but I think it still needs some improvement. Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker.