It’s Halloween day, 2024. You and all your friends are in pursuit of what may be the pinnacle of McGill first-year social life: Halloween Thirsty Thursday at Café Campus.
The tickets are bound to sell out as soon as they drop, and to make matters worse, sales are only going live at noon. However, your plan is foolproof. You and your friends will all log on to the Café Campus website and simultaneously attempt to buy the tickets in bulk. That way, even if the online queue is disgustingly long, someone is bound to secure the highly sought-after tickets. The clock strikes 12. Across the McGill residences, first-years and upperclassmen alike are refreshing their browsers. A 504 error later and your place in the queue is being calculated. Your heart drops. You are number 2,381 in line.
This Halloween, Café Campus’ tickets sold out almost immediately, making attendance at this coveted location incredibly exclusive. But, how much would //you// pay in the face of FOMO? Tickets for Halloween Night One were already valued at a higher price than the usual club entry fee, with tickets being sold for $30 CAD at the door instead of the $20 CAD online ticket. Yet, clearly—and perhaps unsurprisingly—thousands of students were prepared to spend these inflated amounts.
What //is// surprising are the prices students were offering in McGill residence group chats. Within an hour of Café tickets selling out, students were reselling theirs at extreme prices ranging from roughly $50 CAD to over $200 CAD. Of course, the unrealistically expensive tickets were likely not purchased at the prices proposed by their sellers, but a broader truth still remains: McGill students are practicing extreme, unethical ticket scalping.
Although it may sound silly in writing, Café Campus is a space many McGill first-years flock to when seeking to make friends and experience Montréal nightlife for the first time. When tickets are increasingly financially difficult to obtain, economic barriers fracture the student body between those who can afford the steep resale prices and those who cannot. Ticket scalpers capitalize on this reality; it’s Café Campus’s status as a popular social space that enables exorbitant markups.
What McGill students may not know, however, is that a ticket-scalping side hustle can be illegal in Quebec. While most Canadian provinces require ticket scalpers to file a T2125 tax form for profits from ticket reselling, Quebec has stricter regulations. The Office of Consumer Protection in Quebec has prohibited the resale of tickets at prices above their face value since 2012, as per Bill 25. Those who violate the law will face fines between $1,000 CAD to $2,000 CAD for first-time offences and up to $200,000 CAD for repeated violations. For students who have been making a habit of ticket scalping, this legislation should serve as a terrifying deterrent.
So, will McGill students be attacked with lawsuits and charged with fines? It depends. Café Campus ticket scalpers are dancing along an interesting loophole. Currently, the resale of tickets at inflated prices is not punishable by law if the transaction occurs between two consumers. Many websites like StubHub take advantage of this legal loophole, describing their website as a platform for inter-consumer ticket sales, much like AirBnB is a platform for inter-consumer house or apartment rentals. In this way, sites manage to serve as vendors for illegally price-gouged tickets without facing fines. The question of whether a residence hall Instagram group chat violates the concept of the two-consumer rule is unclear. It will likely come as no shock that there is no Canadian legal precedent for a Café Campus Halloween ticket scalping frenzy.
Still, regardless of the potential legal repercussions that ticket scalpers may face, McGill students should feel a social—or even moral—responsibility to avoid the harmful practice.
And yes, I am bitter that I didn’t get a Café Campus ticket.
