Attorney General Madeleine Meilleur says her office is consulting with a number of people in the ticketing industry to see how the law can protect consumers better from the scourge of ticket-scalping bots.

“It’s complicated and it seems like technology always finds a way to go around it,” she told the Star after question period in the legislature.

But capping the amount over face value that a ticket can be sold for is just not something the Ontario government can do, she said.

“We can’t fix the price of tickets,” she said.

Last week, Meilleur said she would look into the secondary ticket market in Ontario, after fans of the Tragically Hip expressed outrage that tickets to the band’s farewell tour were largely unavailable to the public and being sold on online resellers such as Stub Hub.

Ticket reselling was made legal last July, when the attorney general’s office amended the regulations to the Ticket Speculation Act to allow companies to resell tickets, if they offered a money-back-guarantee or could ensure the tickets were authentic.

“The regulation allows ticketholders to resell their tickets at more than their face value on the condition that the tickets are verified by the original vendor or resold by a professional reseller with a money-back guarantee,” Heather Visser, a spokesperson for the attorney general’s office, said in a statement.

“Verification services, created and administered by the industry, are intended to help protect consumers by identifying fraudulent or duplicate tickets, and preventing them from being purchased.”

But many aspects of the ticket reselling business are still unregulated.

There is nothing on the books to outlaw the use of specialty software known as “ticket bots,” which enable ticket brokers to buy thousands of tickets in mere minutes.

In an op-ed for the New York Times, Lin-Manuel Miranda, the Broadway wunderkind behind the smash Hamilton urged New York State legislature to pass a law banning bots.

“StubHub has supported, and will continue to support, legislation prohibiting the use of bots that is substantive, comprehensive, and inclusive of the range of issues impacting fans’ access to tickets,” wrote company spokesperson Shannon Kelly in an email. “Sellers are responsible for following any regional resale restrictions associated with their location.”

Neither the Hip’s manager Patrick Sambrook, nor representatives from his company Eggplant Entertainment, were immediately available for comment.

Carrie Davis, chief communications officer for Live Nation, the parent company of Ticketmaster and promoter for the Hip’s tour, was not immediately available for comment.

Bots are only part of the equation, the New York state attorney’s office found, after conducting an extensive investigation of the ticket-scalping industry.

As Ontario did, New York flirted with a free market approach to ticket resellers, representatives from the state attorney’s office told the Star.

But the New York investigation found that both government and industry need to do a better job at making the ticket industry a level playing field for consumers.

Often ticket brokers advertise tickets that they don’t own, frequently at sky-high prices, and procure them once they’ve found a buyer.

The state attorney’s office has been pursuing brokers who advertise tickets they don’t own, using laws on the books that protect consumers from fraud and false advertising.

According to the Ontario attorney general, this ticket speculation is legal.

“Under Ontario law, it is not illegal to offer a ticket for sale if one does not own the ticket at the time of the offer,” Visser wrote.

The New York state attorney is calling on the entertainment industry to be more transparent about how many tickets are actually up for sale.

Often, a large portion is reserved for industry insiders, and many of these tickets wind up in the hands of ticket brokers, the New York office found.

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Jay Strosberg, a Canadian lawyer who led a class-action lawsuit against Ticketmaster in 2009, says he’s baffled why the Ontario government would choose to undo its previous efforts to protect consumers from ticket-scalpers.

“The government should either regulate this area or not. If it chooses to regulate the area, it should place common sense restrictions on how far above face value tickets can be sold for,” Strosberg said in an email to the Star.

“If it doesn’t, money that should be paid to artists will be diverted to speculators and affordable access to entertainment will be a thing of the past.”

Although Meilleur said regulating the price of tickets is not something the government is considering, other jurisdictions have done this; before making scalping legal in 2007, New York capped the amount brokers could charge at 45 per cent above face value.

But that pushed a lot of ticket reselling onto the black market, said representatives from the New York attorney general’s office.

Strosberg’s lawsuit, which was settled out of court, helped lead to Ticketmaster shuttering TicketsNow, its own reselling website.

Since the regulations were changed in Ontario last July, Ticketmaster and Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment have each started operating ticket-reselling websites.

The government said it consulted with both primary and secondary ticket sellers, as well as the public, before changing the regulations.

But Strosberg, and other industry insiders opposed to ticket-scalping, say they didn’t hear about this until the new regulations were in force.

“We did wide consolations,” Meilleur told the Star. “Sometimes we can not do them all, but, trust me, we don’t want this to happen. I feel for those (affected).”

Meanwhile, the opposition has attacked the Liberal Party for accepting thousands of dollars of political donations from Live Nation, Ticketmaster’s parent company, in the years leading up to the regulatory changes.

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.

Meilleur says she was completely unaware of the donations, and vehemently denies they had any bearing on the policy-making process.

“Absolutely not. Absolutely not. I didn’t even know that they’ve given some money,” she said.