The Ben Mulroney Show - Tickets! Get your tickets! Why scalping is all the rage (or causing rage) in Toronto

Episode Date: October 23, 2025

GUEST:   Alan Cross- The ongoing history of new music If you enjoyed the podcast, tell a friend! For more of the Ben Mulroney Show, subscribe to the podcast! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://link.chtbl.com/bms⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Also, on youtube -- ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@BenMulroneyShow⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow Ben on Twitter/X at https://x.com/BenMulroney Insta: ⁠⁠⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠⁠⁠ Twitter: ⁠⁠⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠⁠⁠ TikTok: ⁠⁠⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠⁠⁠ Enjoy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast is brought to you by the National Payroll Institute, the leader for the payroll profession in Canada, setting the standard of professional excellence, delivering critical expertise, and providing resources that over 45,000 payroll professionals rely on. With a Subaru, a vehicle that's built to last come standard. Heated front seats? Standard. High ground clearance? Standard.

Eye sight driver assists to help spot the scooter delivery guy texting, merging, and eating all at once? Standard. Parallel parking perfectly while someone watches? Uncommon. But in a Subaru, standard-ish. Subaru, uncommon come standard. Hurry into your local Subaru dealership today for lease rates from 1.99% for 24 months on select models.

And get great value that, you guessed it, come standard. Conditions apply. See dealer for details. Welcome to the Ben Mulroney show. October 23rd. Thank you so much for spending your day with us. Just one more day after today. And then it's, well, tomorrow is the beginning of the World Series. And if you were concerned that the visiting team would not make it to Toronto for whatever

reasons, don't worry because there are some Dodger fans out there that are, that we're tracking the flight in real time just to make sure that that entire team made it safely to Toronto. And by the way, thank you so much for the Breakfast Club opening of the show. I really appreciate that. Thank you. The biggest superfan in the city got to be the mayor? You think so? I think so. I mean, she loves the Jays. Let's listen to how much she loves the Jays. Let's listen to how much

she loves the Jays. Go! Yeah! You know, Greg Brady actually said the most diplomatic way ever. If she wasn't the mayor, she would be the most wonderful person to have around super positive and by the way when I meet her personally she's a a fantastic fantastic person you can see why people vote for her she connects emotionally and she is she is actually she's very very friendly and very friendly a really really warm person in person but it's and if that was her job she would be great at it she would be great at it. Hey, Premier Doug Ford has said that he is looking at cracking down

on the ticket gouging, the scalping, the prices skyrocketing after fans were hit with huge resale prices for the World Series. Some in the lower bowl, some tickets are going for 10K, 10K. And I was listening to Greg Brady on the way in today, and the ideas that the government is suggesting. I was like, I think I've heard those before. And it took a minute for me to realize that, yeah, everything that is new, everything old is new again. Let's, let's listen to Doug Ford saying that this is something that he wants to address. A lot of Blue Jays fans are facing big ticket prices. Your government scrapped legislation that would have capped those resale prices. Will you bring that back? Yeah, we actually talked about that. And, you know,

my personal opinion, I've got to talk to the whole team, but they're gouging the people. When you have one player in the market that controls the tickets, that's not right for people. So we're actually reviewing that right now. Considering legislation? Well, we're looking at that right now. Why did you happen in the first place? Well, let's look at it and we'll see. I just don't believe in one company controlling everything. And that's what's happening right now with Ticketmaster, in my opinion. Well, yeah. And it's worse than one company controlling everything. Oh, by the way, not for nothing. The LCBO has a monopoly. And we seem to be just fine with that

in this province. So, I mean, if it's not complaining about that. It's the Ticketmaster of Booz. But, actually, I very much like the LCBO by my house. Very much. But the issue is not just that they are the end-all be-all for tickets. It's they also have fingers in all of the resale website companies. In a lot of cases, they are owners or co-owners or part-owners. And that, to me, it just smells bad. It looks bad and it smells bad.

So even if everything was above board, I don't trust it. And I don't think anybody should trust. I mean, Dave was telling us, Dave Spargal, our technical. producer was saying that they were getting snatched up left right and center, right? Within a few minutes, they were all... Oh, once they bought them, they were already up for resale at like whatever the

price was. It was ridiculous. Before the sale was even done. Yeah, like people are still at the checkout and they're already up there. Yeah. Yeah. Now, as a reminder, if you want to get back in the way back machine, in 2017, Ontario had anti-scalping laws. It was the 2017 Ticket Sales Act. It banned bots and capped resale prices at 50% above face value.

And Doug Ford's government scrapped those rules in 2019, calling them unenforceable. And Mike Droulet, my intrepid producer, we were talking earlier today. You, you bought, like, we're going back and forth about, like, what is a ticket? And I was like, it's not your property. You don't own the seat. You don't buy it. You're not an entrepreneur if you buy a bunch of tickets and then resell them. That's not, you're not adding value.

You're not doing anything. Yeah, because I suggested how can you stop somebody from selling something at whatever price they want to do? If there's supply and demand and somebody wants to pay X amount of dollars for it, then who are you to say something? But then again, as you point out, you do not own that seat. No, it's not like your stuff that you put on Facebook marketplace, right? That's not this. You are a paying guest to attend an event. It is, and the team is owned by somebody, the building is owned by somebody.

and you are paying to have that experience. That's it. And so because of that, I have to assume there is a legal difference between property and buying a ticket. Yeah. And Ford said, though, when he scrapped those rules back in 2019,

he said they called them unenforceable. But we live in a digital age. And they can put restraints on the tickets. They can do things. I still don't know how you completely do it. Like when I was young, when I was in high school, I used to go to Leaf Games

and buy tickets from scalper. Yeah. My friend and I would wait five minutes into the first period and then to say, hey, you want to buy $20 for Reds and you would get great seats. Yeah, but can I tell you, like going to the game, what's really nice now is you don't have all the scalpers like screaming at you as you go in?

It's quiet because I don't know what happened to that industry. Yeah, selling tickets. Yeah. Selling tickets. You buy tickets, tickets, yeah. All right, well, yesterday in question period, the liberals asked to reinstate the law that Doug Ford had.

previously gotten rid of. The mechanic is seeking unanimous consent for leave to move a motion without notice asking the government to immediately reinstate the cap on ticket resale prices at 50%

more than face value. Agreed. I heard a no. Yeah, so it's a no. I heard a lot of nos. A lot of knows, exactly. And look, we're living in a time where the federal liberals just copy and paste

whatever was on the Tories website and it's fine it's fine no one cares anymore it's just what happens and then or they will they'll vote down a crime bill by the Tories only to come back with a version of their own

a few days later so they want to put their own stamp on this they're going to build it out I don't have a problem with it but I do think that there is a way to at least tamp down on this industry. Meanwhile, Ticketmaster said the company says teams and promoters, not Ticket master, decide pricing, inventory, and release timing. Ticketmaster and parent company

Live Nation told U.S. Senators, they're ending their trade desk scalping program to avoid reputational harm. That's where they're selling their own inventory on the secondary market before they even sell it. It's nuts. People just want to go, people just want to go see a show or they want to see a game. It shouldn't be this hard, you know, and there are a lot of smart people out there who've tried to square this circle. I'm not one of them.

Think about all the people who've tried to take on Ticketmaster. Remember Pearl Jam did that. By selling it, yeah? Back in the, I think it was the late 90s when Pearl Jam were one of the biggest acts in the world. They're still big, but, I mean, they were huge at the time. They took on Ticketmaster, and they tried to do their own ticket selling system

failed miserably. And they went to Congress, and they ended up, they gave up. They were like, they realized they just couldn't beat big, bad ticket masks. There was also, I want to say Taylor Swift and not on this tour, I want to say it was Taylor Swift, but it might have been another artist who said, you know what, the biggest problem is the people who are in the front rows, they aren't the super fans. They aren't, they are the ones who can afford to be there. And so we don't get to feed off of that energy the way that you used to be able to do it.

And so I think they would reserve those tickets for fan giveaways or sell them actually sell them personally on their website so that they could have true fans that love the music in the front row. Listen, I have no idea. I have no idea how to fix this. Well, the artists, though, you're talking about music artists. They always say they would rather have their fans there, the hardcore fans than these people just have the money to be able to buy stuff.

and also they get a little angry as well. I mean, they're selling their tickets for, I mean, it's not cheap to go to a concert, say $200 for a ticket. And then if people are reselling it for $800, they're like, well, other people are making more on those tickets than us. Oh, yeah. And we're the ones who are performing.

Oh, yeah. But they make it back on merch and. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But still, it's still the fact is that somebody's reselling something of yours for more. Yeah. Well, listen, we've laid out the problem. If there is a solution to bring to this mess, our next guest will reveal it.

This is the Ben Mulroney Show. Don't go anywhere. We are coast to coast to coast on the chorus radio network. Welcome back to the Ben Mulroney show. Look, it's small business week, and we've been talking to entrepreneurs in the spirit of entrepreneurship. But this is a bridge too far even for me. The scalping and the price gouging that's been happening, not just, uh, for the Toronto Blue Jays, but indeed across live events for, I guess, forever.

So to talk about the history of this phenomenon as well as possible solutions forward, we're joined by someone with, oh gosh, a depth of knowledge and all the stuff I wish I knew. Alan Cross from the ongoing history of new music. Alan, welcome back to the show. Here we are again talking about an age-old problem that no one has been able to fix. Is it an age-old problem? It's about 175 years old. The first documented case of modern ticket scalping goes back to 1855 when a singer named

the Swedish songbird came to the U.S., and all of a sudden her tickets, tickets to all her shows were sold out because somebody had made a deal with somebody on the inside, grabbed all the tickets, and then went up and down the sidewalk where people were standing in line and sold them tickets at 100% markup. Okay, interesting. Yeah, so somebody thought I can make – they thought they were starting a business. They thought they were entrepreneurs. as we were talking about this before the break,

I mean, I don't know if I'm right about this, but I feel like I'm right, and that's all that matters, that you don't own the seat. It's not your property. It's not like selling something on Facebook Marketplace. No, you own the right to get into the building at a specific time. Yeah. And it's a contract between you and the venue and the promoter

and the artist that allows you admittance to this particular event on such and such a day and such and such a time. That's what a concert ticket is. The problem is getting your hands on one. This is one of the most frustrating and opaque consumer experiences out there. But it is a very complex one. And I've done podcasts and other radio shows on the whole business of ticket selling. And, you know, Doug Ford talks about Ticketmaster gouging people.

Well, that's a very, very, very simplistic thing about... what's happening i i wrote something this morning on my website a journal of musical things dot com and i go through all the relevant points about why this is this is just a nut it's tilting at windmills again people have tried to fix the scalping problem for two centuries yeah but but alan it's you said it's complex does it have to be complex you mean you just said it it's a it's a contract between the people who own the building and you you you you buying the right to get in at a certain time. That's a pretty simple contract.

Yeah, it's a simple concept, but actually executing that is extraordinarily difficult. And it has become more difficult since we've entered the Internet age. I mean, it used to be that you could line up at a box office and buy a physical paper ticket. And that was your admittance into the show. But that ticket was not necessarily tied to you. You could give it away. You could sell it for a profit. You could do whatever you wanted.

Okay, so that doesn't work. When it comes to buying tickets online, you're supposed to be, you know, a verified purchaser. You're supposed to be not worry about ticket buying bots ahead of you. It's not happening. It's a giant game of whackamol as soon as any ticket seller, ticket faster included, comes up with a solution to prevent tickets from getting out onto the secondary market, which is where they really sell for exorbitant amounts. somebody comes up with another idea. Now, there are all kinds of problems with Ticketmaster.

First of all, let's just, you know, they do not set the face value of the ticket. They only make their money through fees. And that's a whole other stuff. And there's all those fees, right. But, Alan, I got to ask, the secondary market from the story that I remember, maybe this has changed, it was that some of these ticket resellers are owned, at least in part, by Ticketmaster. Is that not true?

No, no, no, no, no. Not true? No. All right. Okay. Has their verified resale sites. Okay. Which means if you buy a ticket, you can go back to Ticketmaster and get them to resell your ticket for you through a secure portal.

All right. Then I rescind what I said. Okay. Ticket Master does have this thing called Trade Desk. And Trade Desk was something that was exposed about seven, eight years ago, where Ticketmaster had all these special access accounts for bulk buyers, reliable bulk buyers of tickets, and they would get first dibs on buying these tickets from Ticketmaster. Now, that particular thing, Trade Desk, has been under a lot of pressure from the U.S. government and their current Federal Trade Commission lawsuit against Ticketmaster.

And earlier this week, Ticketmaster says they are permanently shutting down Trade Desk. Okay, good. All right. So, listen, so that's the lay of the land. But now you have the big brain. You've been thinking about this. You've been talking about this. writing about this. If you could wave a magic wand and create a new system that made it more

fair for people to get tickets at a reasonable cost, I don't know, the best case scenario, how do you build that system? You don't. I don't know if you can. I mean, Ticketmaster is a multi-billion dollar company and they spend, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars trying to get tickets in the hands of fans, you know, with their boss. block blocking technology and all this other stuff, I, I, I, if I came up with a solution to scalping and the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the technology prices on the secondary market, I would be rich. I don't see a solution right now. I just don't. Other than, you know what? Okay, we can go there. Facial recognition. Yeah. Yeah. I mean,

listen, the technology exists. Yeah. And look, just to bring it back to the Js for a moment, Alan, uh, uh, uh, my producer, my technical producer, just put this in the dock that there are seats, dugout reserved seat section, 130, row 10 seats, 5 through 10, two tickets, 21, almost 20, yeah, $21,000. And that's today, you know what's going to go up. Face value, 17,000. Service fee, almost 4,000. There's the problem there, you know, because of the second, see, Ticketmaster double dips with service fees. If you resell something on Ticketmaster, they charge or something. service fee again, which is a percentage of the selling price of the ticket. Now, it costs

absolutely no more to sell a ticket the first time around than it does to sell the second time around. Yeah. So if you have the ticket's $500 and it's a 5% service fee, okay, that's one price. But if you flip that ticket and you're selling you for $21,000, all of a sudden the service fee is, you know, in the thousands. Yeah, yeah. Well, then what, listen, that, that you could legislate away. A government could come and just say, nope, no, you can't do that. We can cap that at, you know, five percent once. Yes, you could do that. So that, that solves the ticket master fee problem. It doesn't solve the fact that scalpers will charge whatever they can get for the ticket itself. Yeah. And look, that, that was a problem that we were happy to live with because

that didn't really, that didn't make it impossible to get a ticket, right? That's one of the big, That's the 21st century problem, is that you could be waiting, you could be the first person to wait in that digital line and next thing you know, all the tickets are gone. Yeah, that's right. And that's the problem. And there has yet to be a way to sort things out.

Is there, like, I know that some musicians have tried to create a little community, a little gated garden where they had more say over how these, the tickets for their shows were allocated. Yeah. Yeah. Did anyone get close to a solution? Oh, there are people trying. God love them.

They're trying. They're trying. But, you know, ticket masters are really, really big. They have licenses with the biggest venues, the most important venues. So that's a problem. But here's the other thing is when this dirty little secret that bands scalped their own tickets. I think I heard that. Here's what happens.

There's something called withhold. withholdings, or holdbacks, a band is entitled under the deal with their promoter to have a certain number of tickets put aside for them, friends and family, that kind of thing, right? Yep. Well, the margins on touring can be so, so tight that those friends and family tickets will be scalped by the band just to make some extra money. You know, can I just tell you, I feel, when I talk to you, I feel smarter when I talk to you. Oh, well, good.

I can't say that about everyone. Certainly can't say it when I talk to my producer, Mike Drillet. When I talk to you, I feel smarter. And I think there was a, you know, Pearl Jam tried to break this stranglehold, and it did not work. Nope. All right. So I guess so you're saying, I really thought that with your big brain, you were going to solve this problem for the entire world. But I guess that was just a too tall of an order.

Until we get the facial recognition and all the privacy problems that go along with that. Why is that a privacy problem? Facial recognition is on our phone already. We use it for all sorts of stuff. Yeah, but do you want your phone in a Ticketmaster database? Or you want your picture in a Ticketmaster database? We're going to go from there. Listen, my face is out there anyway when I go in my face.

My face is in too many places already. Alan Cross, hey, thank you so much for being here. I wish we'd come to a solution, but who knows? Maybe in our next segment we will because we want to hear from you. Have you scalped? Have you been a scalpe? We want to hear your stories right here on the Ben Mulroney show. Welcome back to the Ben Mulroney show.

Time to turn the microphone over to you, the listeners. We want to hear about your experiences. Scalping. You might have been the scalper. You might have been the scalpy. Let us know. And how do you feel about the ticket resale, the secondary market, as it's called?

Some people avail themselves of it all the time. Some have a workaround to avoid high prices. Others have no time for it, and they think it signals the demise of the democracy that is sports and live events. And so give us a call for 16870-6400 or 1-3-8-2-25 talk. We're going to start with Mike. Mike, happy Thursday to you. Ben, how are you? A great show. I'm glad to see you back on TV, too. Oh, well, thank you very much. I appreciate that. Yeah. Here's a question for you. When you You do a lot of flying around. When you buy a ticket for a carrier, you have to put your name in, your passport number, everything else.

Yep. So you go to the airport and you say, oh, I can't go. Here, buddy, on the street. Take my ticket and go in. You can't do that. Yeah, true. So if they can do it for that, why can't they do it for these tickets? Hold on.

Let me work that out. If you buy a ticket to get on a plane. To fly from Toronto to Orlando. Okay. Yep. I get a ticket on my phone. It's in my name. And my passport number is on it even.

So I go to the airport and I say, oh, I can't go here, buddy, I'm going to... Well, I guess the question would be, and that's a really good question, Mike. I guess the question would be, we have to trust the government with our personal information. Would you trust Ticketmaster with the same amount of information? Just put your name on it. Your name and your address. You don't need a social insurance number or passport. Yeah, but I guess also the issue is like the security involved in checking a ticket at

Roger Center, I'm sure, is nowhere near what it is going through security. I go to the games about hockey games all the time. They can say, oh, here's your ticket. Do a random audit. Can I see your license? Yeah, you know what? I want to verify this as you. It's a good question, Mike.

I'm not, I'm just trying to find it. I didn't want to start using my brain this early in the morning, but thank you very much. I appreciate it, man. Have a great day. Okay, thanks, Ben. Bye. All right, let's go to Mary. Mary, welcome to the show.

Good morning. Good morning. Some years ago, my sister was given four free tickets to the Tina Turner concert, and only the two of us went, so we had two extra tickets. So we went to the seats, and they were the crappiest seats at the ECC. They were right up against the wall top row. Okay. If I stood up, I felt like my head was going to hit the ceiling, and I'm only five foot one.

So we went back down, I took two of the tickets, and I convinced the scalper, to buy two tickets off of me and they were face value like $220 and I convinced the scalper to buy them for me for 50 bucks so I can at least cover the cost of my parking because I parked underneath the ACA. Sure, yeah.

And I convince them, buddy, I go, you can flip them for 75 bucks and you can make an easy $25 so I convinced the scalper to pick up the tickets for $50 covered in my parking. And then my sister and I just went to the 200-level restaurant and ended up spending like $300 for seafood and drinks.

Yeah, listen, And listen, on the anecdotal stories, the one-on-one stories of how somebody was able to flip something and make a night of it, those are great stories. It's when this happens en masse, when there's a structural system in place, Mary, that deprives, like, everyday people from even having access to the chance of getting a ticket. That's what we're talking about in 2025. Yeah. Yeah. We're looking at the cost of everything, hockey, baseball, basketball, everything. the further the teams get along, the more expensive, the cost of the tickets are like,

we're looking at, you know, hockey tickets, a pair of them, a thousand bucks for a nothing game. Yeah. To play a nothing team. You know what I mean? It's ridiculous. And then if they play somebody like, you know, Las Vegas or if they play Montreal, the price of the tickets go double. And it's just regular season tickets. Well, listen, I appreciate the call.

And thanks for the story. All right. Let's, who do we have? We got Jim. Jim, thanks so much for calling. Yeah. Can you hear me? Yes, again. Yep. Okay, I'll try to make this as quick as possible.

I was down in Florida two years ago. I went to see the Leafs and the Lightning and playoffs. It was fantastic. But when I ordered the ticket to Ticketmaster online, gave my credit card, just on the last screen after I put the credit card in, I was expecting to see purchase. It says, oops, sorry, someone just got that ticket before you. You guys start over again.

So I did. I started over again. I got another ticket, wasn't quite as good as the first one. Yeah. And paid my credit card again. And then all of a sudden, an hour later, I find out they charged me for both tickets, even though the first time it said that it didn't go through. Okay?

Okay. It was a nightmare. It was a nightmare to try and get my refund back. So when I finally went to the game, I had a nightmare to which one? Because I had, I don't know. So you had, you had proof of purchase of two tickets? No, one ticket.

But I knew, I knew, actually, from what I remember, I did have the seat number and a barcode for the other one. They says, no, it didn't go through. So then the other one, I scanned the one. They said, no, it doesn't work. I scanned the other one. It says it works. I went in. Okay.

Now, here's the funny part. I said, I bet they never resold that ticket. I think there was a glitch. the system. It said it was bought. It wasn't bought. Yeah. So I went to the first seat, which was the better one.

Yeah. It was a fantastic seat, first level. Yeah. And so you sat there for the game? I sat there for half the game. Yeah. And then in the third period, I went to the other seat. Yeah, listen.

So I got both ends. Hey, thank you, Jim. I appreciate it. Listen, no, no system is going to be perfect. I'm not faulting ticket master for having these technical snafus. Of course, that's going to happen. But in a world of facial recognition and all that, that stuff.

Surely we can do better than what we're doing today. Right? Like, no system is ever going to be perfect. As we said, scalping has been around for a hundred and some odd years. So surely we can just do better than what the system that we have today. Let's check in with Pat. Pat, welcome to the Ben Mulroney show. Morning.

Just telling your screener, I've gone to soccer games in Europe. Yep. And for you to get tickets in Europe, you have to have ID. And when you show up to the stadium, your ID better match what's on the ticket. or they don't let you in. And regardless of what you pay for this thing. And you can only buy them from certain outlets. Like you have to buy them either at the stadium

where you buy them from the team's outlets. So all these people that have, I mean, you can still buy them on StubHub and ticket out at all the other places you can buy them. But it makes a lot difficult when you're buying a ticket and you show up with ID. If you don't show up with ID, they don't let you in. Yeah, yeah.

And if you're from another part of the city or country, like say one team is playing another team and you're from outside that region, you have to actually fill out a form so that they know who you are when you're coming to that game and the event that something happens, they can trace you.

So if they can do that with 80,000 people, 90,000, then they're crazy games in Europe. Yeah. They can do that here. Well, thank you very much for that. And look, I think we should just be looking for best practices and see if we can apply those in some way to the system here.

All right, we got Evan is going to probably be one of our last calls, but I'm glad I got you, Evan, because you are the counterpoint. Absolutely. and I'll be very upset if they shut down scalpers because then I would have to actually pay cost price and above. I pay below. How do you do that? By shopping properly.

Okay, but no, no, walk me through it. Shopping properly. I thought going direct to the source would be the proper way to do it. Well, my last two purchases, which was for Shakira and for Mana, I used Facebook Marketplace, and there's a whole bunch of people trying to sell, and you tell them how much you're going to pay. and they're desperate at the end because they don't want to have to wait

to the last second, which the tickets will be worthless. So, okay, but yes, but I have to assume this is a particular situation because, like, no one is going to find a single ticket available on Facebook marketplace. The demand is too hot. Of course you can. Of course you can. For the Blue Jays game?

Why not? Because, well, the demand is too high. We haven't had to get, like, for a concert, it might be a little different because if you, don't get tickets in one city, you can go see that person in another. There's only seven of these games at most. So it's a little bit, don't you, I'm trying to, I'm trying to see where the similarities are and where the differences are. I've bought in sports tickets, you know, in other cities, using the same thing, single tickets, double tickets, whatever.

But they were not playoffs or whatever, but, you know, I don't see any problem, you know. You just, you know, it's, you know, you're the French major. I forget the Latin terms, but buyer beware. Just got to know what you're doing. Yeah. Well, hey, listen, thank you for caveat, mTOR. Thank you very much, my friend. We've got time.

George, make your point in 10 seconds, please. Well, took two oldest trades in the world, prostitution and scalping tickets. They all existed on the street. Now they've all gone digital, right? They all have gone online. And that's, you know, Instagrammers. Instagrammers is a woman and get all those hookers. How do you drive Ferrari's in Dubai?

You look at them and that's it. We've got to leave it there, George. We're ending on a high note. Thank you so much. Up next, Mayor Chow says she's standing her ground on what? Stick around. Welcome back to the Ben Mulroney show, and you can't go a day in the city of Toronto

without talking about life on the streets of this city, whether it be the safety that we feel as we walk down the street or the speed at which we drive down the road. There are issues with bike lanes that, in my humble estimation, make life for drivers impossible. And we've been living in a world of speed cameras for a while. Our premier has said and is putting together legislation that will make them illegal in the province of Ontario. The mayor of Toronto says she's going to fight this. She says she will not give up on speed cameras despite the province's planned to plan.

to ban them. This is what she said. Quote, unless someone physically removes those speed cameras, we're going to keep them. She didn't rule out a legal challenge against the province's new speed camera law. And look, let's be honest.

If you're looking at the scoreboard, it's Toronto One, the province, zero as it relates to Doug Ford's desire to get rid of bike lanes on arterial roads in cities like Toronto. The city won, or rather the cyclists won in court thus far. And so, you know, if he's going to change the law, he's got to come correct because otherwise it's going to be a problem.

I said this yesterday. Oh, give us a call. 416870-6400. Let us know how you feel. This is, this fight is not over, which means the conversation will continue. I personally, and I said this yesterday, like the idea of. of keeping them exclusively in school zones because in my experience,

I've driven past schools where there are speed cameras and they are effective at slowing down traffic. So if that's a way to keep kids safe, I'm all for it. Any other way to use them I don't want to talk about. It's a cash grab. It is done. And a city like Toronto loves it because it's free money.

And what do they do with free money? They spend it. Well, they spend every kind of money. And so give us a call, 416, 8, 7. 6,400 or 1-8-2-25 talk. Like the speed camera by my daughter's school, I think it's a great idea as I'm driving towards the school, but I don't think I should get dinged

if I'm driving in the opposite direction because that to me shows me exactly what they're using it for. So 416-8-6400 or 1-8-225 talk. Look, if I were Doug Ford, I would use this as a bargaining chip. I would say, like I would pivot from my position or be willing to pivot from my position of banning them all together and see if you can extract concessions from cities like Toronto that have activists running city hall and driving this

place into a situation that I don't think we've seen in a very long time. And if he wants the city to act on X, Y or Z, use this as a leverage point. Say, all right, I'm willing to entertain a compromise. What are you going to give me in return? I mean, that's, that's a that's that's how politics is done right yeah everyone wins everyone gets something out of a deal so the the province would get something i don't know what maybe maybe uh maybe they'd back off their pressure on bike lanes so that he could have the uh the he wouldn't have to be distracted by voices at city hall complaining when he when he challenges the uh the court ruling that came down uh this summer saying he couldn't get rid of the bike lanes maybe maybe that's it i don't

know maybe there's something else that is uh that's stuck in his craw But I'd love to hear from you, 41688-60-6400 or 1-8-225 talk. And look, let's also remember, it's not like prior to the advent of speed cameras, we were living in some lawless hinterland where drivers could get away with whatever they wanted with impunity. They were brought in at a certain time, and they made some money and they slowed some people down. Like, but prior to that, we had speed limits, we had speed bumps, we had traffic calming, technology, technology is like, you know, so like, it's not like if we get rid of this. We're somehow regressing to a place where we can't govern ourselves with respect for one another. But I think, and also, I think we got to remember, the mayor, it's incumbent upon the mayor, if she wants to keep these, take,

Give us a better plan than just putting them back. I think we're past that point in the conversation that if we're having the conversation about getting rid of them all together, if the person who's in charge of this says that's his intent, then she has to, the onus is on her and her team and those who want to keep them to promote a vision of life with speed cameras

that more people can get behind. because I think we've woken up to the fact that this is not this is not how things should be. Mike, welcome to the Ben Mulroney show. Oh, I think we lost Mike. Yeah, Mike's gone.

I don't know. I don't know. Mike, give us a call back. We want to hear from you. Give us a call. 416-8-6400 or 1-8-225 talk. Yeah, it's, yes, so it's incumbent upon her. But I would very much like a world where these cameras are still protecting our schools. If that's the value that they have in society, I think we can all get behind it. Welcome back, Mike.

Hey, yeah, good morning. Well, you know what? Listen, he's been looking at this project in development in its infant stages. It's all past this desk. He had people working on it. I mean, they rolled out right across the province with all these cameras. He's signed off on it. Why now all of a sudden change your heart?

Are you trying to play for a certain political crowd? Hold on. Let me just check with you. I'm not as well-versed in this as I am on other things, but I'm pretty sure the speed cameras were born of the previous liberal government. The rollout of it was on his watch. They had so many people. They rolled out like 300 cameras over one year across the province.

That's fair. I'll take you at your word for that. No reason to dispute it. But, you know, if something has already been paid for and there was a justification at the time for it, you roll it out and you see how it works, right? You improve it, you fix it, to put it in school zones. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, no, exactly. But this is, I don't fault him for rolling it out.

I would fault him for keeping it if it's sole purpose is to make the government money because that's not, that shouldn't be the purpose. But hey, Mike, thank you very much for the call. And let's go to Todd. Todd, welcome to the Ben Mulroney show. Hi, Ben. It's, yeah, so I listen to you this morning on the way to work. I love hearing it. I always hear you repeat something, and I just have a question to it of, you know,

it's a cash grab these speed cameras. But in my view, it's like it's only a cash grab if you choose to speed. So if you choose to drive the speed limit, then it's not a cash grab. Well, if you choose to drive 10 kilometers over to speed limit, then you are understanding that you face. the consequence of having a ticket. Okay, well, listen, and that's a fair counterpoint, but work with me here,

if the issue really was making sure that people were not behaving dangerously and if they were repeat offenders and they were caught by these cameras time and time and time and time again, that would make them danger on the road. The fact that these cameras do not take points off of your license tells me a lot about what the intent is.

Secondly, I'll say in a lot of cases, especially near my house. The speed limit used to be 50 and it was dropped to 40, which is an insanely slow number. And then the speed camera went in. As far as I'm concerned, that's entrapment. And I know it's not entrapment, but it feels that way. I just think a little cynicism should be ascribed in the motivations of the government.

Their motivations were not pure or entirely pure, Todd. no good good point thanks thanks for taking my call thank you my friend i appreciate it uh yeah every and then look i appreciate conversations like that it makes me think think things through we got time for one more let's welcome karen to the show good morning good morning um ben thanks for taking my call i just wanted to um mention about a little village called atherly where they had proposed to put a speed camera in um they've put that on hold right now I only have about 20 seconds left. Okay.

It was between the lights at Tim Horton's and a new stop sign that they put in maybe three years ago. It wasn't even a block hardly. Yes. It was a truly revenue grab. Yeah, it was a revenue grab and it wasn't optimized for safety anyway. Exactly. That's my point. If you come up with a more thoughtful, intentional plan, I think a lot of people will get behind it.

Thank you so much to all of our callers. Hey. You know what I'm going to be.