Subscribe to our Newsletter

Subscribe to our Newsletter

Bill 18 - Film and Video Classification Act

November 3, 2008 - Committee of the Whole

Ms Blakeman: Thanks very much, Mr. Chairman. I’m pleased to be able to rise in Committee of the Whole and speak again to Bill 18, the Film and Video Classification Act. I’ll admit that I was going to bring forward a motion, and I’ve just decided to pull it. Let me talk a bit about that. It was a Hail Mary pass. I admit that. Sometimes I just go ahead and do those Hail Mary passes because they need to be done, but I don’t think this is going to deal with the problem that I know exists.

Let me just outline that again. We have a situation here where ticket speculation has moved from what all of us know, and some people love, as scalping. That’s where you would often see people selling tickets for a premium outside of, usually, sporting events. What’s happened to ticket scalping is that it’s moved high tech and electronic, and it’s now known as ticket speculation. My concerns around Bill 18 were that in repealing the Amusements Act, we were eliminating the one little bit of protection that we had there for anyone that was affected negatively by ticket speculation. At the same time, in reviewing what was out there to offer to replace that and offer protection for people, I was not satisfied with the protection that exists now. I still want to see the government complete a vigorous review and investigate the Ontario Ticket Speculation Act in putting in place protections.

Why do I care? I care because the people that are being negatively affected by this are working citizens in Alberta, and they’re working citizens that are, particularly, either artists or they’re cultural industry workers, so they get their paycheque from the arts.

As I explained in second reading, for people that are working generally in union houses but, really, in any theatrical venue in Alberta, their wage, the amount that they’re paid, is based on what they call the house category, which is a fee structure that is arrived at by looking at the ticket price multiplied by the number of seats in the venue. That gives you a house category, which ranges from A to G. There was a G exception, I think, which was like a 50-seat theatre. It was really tiny. But essentially for all of your stagehands, your spot operators, your technicians that are working the deck of a rock concert or operating the follow spots for Bob Dylan or working the pin rails, which is what raises and lowers your scenery backstage, all of the rates that they get paid are determined by this house category, which is based on the ticket price times the number of seats in the venue.

What’s happening to us right now is that a number of the single ticket sales that are available on the Internet through major ticket sellers and distributors are being purchased and then resold at significantly higher rates. The example I gave you in second reading was a $90 ticket to Alberta Ballet that reappeared on a resale site for $343. My issue with this is that that extra money is not going to Albertans. If citizens are willing to pay that much for it, then Albertans should have shared in that, and they’re not right now.

That money is being taken off by profit, and it’s whisking across the electronic Internet lines and is benefiting a company out of Chicago. My concern as a legislator was for my constituents and for Albertans, who are not being paid what they should be paid if that’s the ticket price that tickets are finally going to go for.

The truth is that not all the tickets get sold for that. They’re picking off the single ticket prices in certain categories, and they’re buying up all of them that they can in a category. This is for, as I said, rock concerts like Metallica, Bob Dylan, Alberta Ballet. Those tickets have all been involved recently in what I’m describing. So when you go to buy a ticket from one of those, the main ticket site will say, “Sorry, we’re completely sold out,” but then it will refer you to a number of other options. You can choose to try and find a ticket on an exchange site and a couple of other things and one of these resale sites. You go to the resale site, and there are the tickets.

Now, how serious is this? Well, Mr. Chairman, it’s pretty serious. Since I’ve been raising this issue and it’s been turning up in Hansard, the secondary ticket sellers have completely removed any connection between the main ticket sellers, and the secondary ticket sellers have completely removed those connections on the Internet sites. They’re paying attention to what I’m saying on the Internet. It’s enough for them to just tone it down, get it out of the way, draw any attention away from it, and wait for this to blow over, and then they’ll be able to bring it back up again and continue doing what they were doing.

I was going to bring forward a motion to repeal everything in the Amusements Act except for the ticket resale section that had existed in that old legislation. The truth is that that old ticket resale provision or prohibition, let me put it that way, really didn’t work very well. It was almost never enforced. You know, people know that it’s there, and they laugh at it. You can go to any athletic event, and there are scalpers outside. It certainly didn’t prevent them. It definitely wasn’t preventing or even unnerving what was going on on the Internet. I was trying to save that protection, and really it’s not a protection. As far as I know, there has never been any attempt to follow through on that and actually prosecute anybody under that – or not for a very long time.

It really wasn’t protecting people, and I thought: well, I’m going to spend time in this Assembly trying to save something that hasn’t really worked. I’d rather spend my time trying to encourage the minister – in this case it’s the Minister of Service Alberta – to look seriously at what’s being offered under the Ontario act and some of the others. It’s not enough to say: well, you know, people aren’t too upset about this. Well, actually they are. The more you look into it, the more concerned people are. I would always tend to say that if we have an opportunity to either protect our citizens or at least to do something so that they’re not getting ripped off, then we should try and do that. These are our citizens. These people live in our major cities, but they also live in every small area, and their families live there.

It was very telling to me that this stuff got taken down off of these sites as soon as I started talking about it and it turned up in Hansard. Of course, I’ve got people watching these sites. I’m going to these sites and watching them. It told me a lot that they just quietly made it all disappear while we are still debating this bill.

I know that the staff from the minister’s office came to the policy field committee that was looking at this and said: don’t worry about it; it’s all covered in the Fair Trading Act. But, Mr. Chairman, it’s not covered in the Fair Trading Act. What it says in the Fair Trading Act was allowing exactly what’s going on to go on, so it’s not protecting people. It’s allowing that activity to go on completely unfettered.

What it says in the Fair Trading Act is that, you know, you can resell a ticket, but you have to tell people what the difference is between the original price and what it’s being resold at. It doesn’t prohibit at all. It says that you can do it; just make sure you tell people the final difference in the price as a sort of buyer beware – right? – that they know what they’re getting. Except that the way it’s actually working on the sites is that you don’t find out what that original ticket was until you’ve already given them your credit card and you’ve bought the new ticket. Then it says: by the way, here was the difference. Comparable price, equal value: words like that they’re using.

You know, the word is in the marketplace that if that’s what you paid for the ticket, that’s the value of the ticket. That’s the argument, that’s the philosophy that’s coming into play here. If you paid $343 for this ticket, that’s the value of the ticket. Except that it wasn’t. Everybody – the ballet dancers on the stage, the director who directed it, the choreographer who did the choreography, the designer who designed the ballet costumes, the person who designed the lighting and the sets, every single stagehand and technician that works on that – all got paid based on the $90 ticket. They didn’t get paid on the basis of that $343 ticket. What’s being allowed here is for our people to be treated unequally.

One of the arguments that I heard in the committee when I raised this was: well, you know, we shouldn’t be stopping this because if Albertans are willing to pay that kind of money for the tickets, eventually they’ll pay that kind of money for all the tickets. But we already know that isn’t true. I come out of the cultural sector, and that’s no surprise to anybody there. In my sector when we first started to see the big shows coming in – The Phantom of the Opera, The Lion King, Cats, all of those huge, huge, huge shows – people were saying: wow, an $80 ticket. This was when people were paying under $20 for tickets to most theatres. Wow, this will be great. Everybody will end up paying way more money. This will bring the level of all of the tickets up to what you’re paying to see The Phantom of the Opera.

You know, sure enough, I took my dad. I wanted a good ticket. It’s the only time he was going to be in that theatre and see something like this, so I forked out 80 bucks a ticket to take my dad to see The Phantom of the Opera. The thing is, we found in our sector that the prices did not go up for everybody else because people said: I’ll pay 80 bucks for a show that’s coming in in 16 tractor-trailer units with a big name that I recognize from Broadway or a television show singing the title; I’ll pay 80 bucks for that, but I won’t pay more than 20 to go to Theatre Network or Workshop West or Lunchbox or the Grand or Vertigo. So the ticket prices did not jump for our local producers up to that $80 range from these big shows that were touring through.

We thought: well, you know, maybe this will bring a whole bunch of new people into our theatres. It didn’t. People would go. They’d take their grandma. They’d fork out the big bucks. They’d go and see one of those shows a year, but it didn’t mean that they would go and buy a subscription now to Theatre Calgary or ATP or Rosebud Theatre or anybody else. They didn’t. It didn’t cross-fertilize in any way, shape, or form. So when somebody says to me, “Well, that’s okay; somebody paying $343 means eventually everybody in that sector is going to be able to charge that kind of money,” based on what we’ve already seen, that’s not going to happen. Some people are willing to pay that for a special occasion, for a certain thing, to go and see Metallica or whatever else they want to see, but it does not translate to the rest of our people, our citizens here in Alberta that are making their living in the cultural sector.

I don’t understand why we would want to have a government that would let somebody essentially rip off our citizens, make enormous profits on the backs of people who are just making a decent living, who are just trying to do a good job in Alberta. That doesn’t make sense to me, especially when we can identify it and we can see it.

I’ve heard and we’ve talked about it a lot in this committee – and, in fact, I passed a motion, which was then repealed and watered down and a weaker version was brought in that’s instructing the minister to have a look at the Fair Trading Act to see if it’ll work. I’m pretty sure that when the minister looks at the Fair Trading Act, she will see that it does not cover these circumstances. It does not address what I’ve brought out.

If the minister would like to talk to some of the people that I’ve talked to and connect with them, I’m sure they would be very happy to come. They kept on top of this. They actually printed out the websites as we were going through this: smart move because the websites have now completely changed. But we have the printed out versions of the websites as they were that showed the process, that it was sold out and then following through and how the tickets are available and for much more money on this secondary site.

I really want to urge the minister to follow through on this and to offer that protection because I don’t think it’s that complicated. If this can be happening in a sort of small way to Alberta Ballet, what else is going on out there through the Internet? It’s very hard for us to control, but I think we’ve got to start somewhere, and somebody’s got to do it, to be able to try and look after our people. Frankly, somebody based in Chicago doesn’t give two hoots what a stagehand is being paid at the Jubilee Auditorium in Calgary. They don’t.

They’re not going to take any less profit just because it’s the right thing to do. They’re not. They’re going to keep taking every cent they can. I think the only way that we’re going to be able to protect our people is to bring in something like that Ticket Speculation Act, which is very clearly trying to deal with the problem that we know is there, not to deal with other stuff.

Let me just take a step back and look at the entire act. I think that for the rest of what is being proposed in Bill 18, generally the public is very happy and satisfied and understands the classification process that we have in Alberta. You know, Albertans and particularly Edmontonians are astonishingly vigorous movie attenders. We are renowned for how many movies we go to. So the classification is important to us.

It’s interesting because we do accept the classification that is in place. It is a classification system, not a censorship system, although interestingly we still tend to accept the classifications that are done elsewhere and just import them. One of the issues that we used to have was that Ontario would actually do the cuts. They would actually censor, and we got their cuts. We got the versions that they had already cut, so we were getting Ontario’s censored versions here and thinking we were being, you know, so brave in doing our own. But we weren’t; we were taking Ontario’s censored versions. Now we’re taking their classified versions, but people seem quite happy with that.

There is bit of an issue about how the classifications work for things outside the traditional movie theatres. So when you get into home movies, DVDs, movie videos, gaming, which is a whole other sector, there are classifications that have been developed by those sectors that seem to be quite well recognized by people that do that kind of thing. I’ve never played one of those games in my life; I wouldn’t know where to start. But I would understand that there’s a classification system in place there that people are fairly happy with.

The filmmakers I spoke to were happy with the way the classification was working for them. Their only thing was that they wanted to see more detailed classification around violence in films, which was what was offending the local filmmakers that I talked to. We’re very strong on talking about and explaining the level of sex and nudity but not very much on the violence, and that’s what was really offending the local filmmakers I talked to.

The rest of what has been brought forward in Bill 18 is working very well for people, but the section that really bothered me was this one tiny little section, and I’ve ended up spending all of my time on it because it affects working Albertans and Albertans working in the cultural sector, which doesn’t get paid a lot to begin with, and there are not a lot of fringe benefits there. Most of them don’t get their health care premiums paid for, which after January will not be a problem. They still don’t get a lot out of that, and they sure as heck don’t get any kind of pension plan. So to not be protecting them and what they’re getting paid now is a real hardship for them, not only now but for their entire lives. They’re working hard. I’d like to respect that work and make sure that they don’t get ripped off and they get every cent that they’ve got coming to them.

That was my one big concern about Bill 18. There are people that I’m sure will be reviewing this Hansard and watching carefully. I’m looking to the government to take that leadership role they need to take to close that loophole where some of our citizens are not being treated fairly and, I would argue, are being ripped off by what’s happening. The fact that the sites have been taken down and disguised right now tells me that I was right on the money.

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.