After listening to the woeful cries of Tragically Hip fans who feel burned by scalpers, Ontario Attorney General Madeleine Meilleur says she’s looking into ways to regulate the online ticketing industry better.

“First of all, I feel sorry for those fans of the Tragically Hip who wanted to go to a concert and have to pay these prices,” Meilleur said during question period on Thursday.

But just a year ago, the government quietly opened the floodgates to allow scalpers to resell tickets online when it changed regulations in the Ticket Speculation Act in the summer of 2015.

Scalping tickets — reselling tickets for above their face value — had always been illegal in Ontario.

But on July 1, 2015, the regulations were changed to allow resellers to make a profit — if the tickets were authenticated.

The changes came as a surprise to many who had campaigned against the secondary ticket market for years.

“I don’t think the government did any due diligence at all, certainly no one spoke to us,” said John Karastamatis, the director of communications for Mirvish Productions.

Representatives from the Attorney General’s office did not respond to repeated requests for comment on how the regulations were passed, or how the office might change the regulations in the future.

The government says it consulted with industry and the public in the fall of 2014, before amending the regulations.

But Karastamatis, who says his company has spent “hundreds of thousands of dollars” in legal fees trying to stop scalpers, says he was never consulted, and learned about these changes after they came into law.

He believes resellers such as Ticketmaster had caught the ear of the powers that be.

Representatives from Live Nation, the parent company of Ticketmaster, did not return repeated requests for comment.

In question period on Thursday, the opposition grilled Meilleur on the government’s role in the whole Hip fiasco.

“So it’s okay, then, to rip off consumers if it’s online, but not face-to-face, according to this government,” said Ontario PC MPP Todd Smith.

Do you have tickets?

Smith accused the Liberal party of accepting $52,700 in donations from Ticketmaster.

A search in the Elections Ontario database shows that Live Nation donated $32,350 between 2012 and 2015, while Ticketmaster donated $13,850 in 2014.

The government did not address the donations during question period, instead; it defended the purpose of the changes to the law.

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From the Attorney General’s perspective, opening the doors to authenticated or guaranteed ticket reselling could only help consumers. Instead of turning to the black market, where they were often ripped off, consumers could go to legal, legitimate resellers who could provide assurance that the ticket they bought could get them in the door.

The problem, many Tragically Hip fans say, is that these resellers seem to have access to tickets they don’t.

Within minutes of being offered for sale on Friday, tickets open to the general public were snapped up.

Almost instantly, tickets were being offered for sale on StubHub or other resellers for sometimes more than $1,000.

A New York Attorney General report found that ticket-buying “bots” and industry insiders were often able to siphon off tickets from the general public, and resell them for sometimes as much as 10 times their face value.

Fans’ sense of outrage was loud enough to elicit a comment from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

During a press conference, Trudeau was asked whether the federal government could take steps to address fairness in concert ticket sales, given the controversy over how many Hip tickets have been snapped up for over-priced resale.

He says the music and ticket industries ought to be able to police themselves, but that the government would be willing to follow up on the issue.

With files from Robert Benzie and The Canadian Press

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