From today, 12 September 2026, nobody can resell a ticket to a Quebec consumer for more than the price the organiser's authorised seller announced, unless the organiser says otherwise in writing. That last clause is the whole story. Quebec's Bill 10 caps resale at face value and then hands the key to the cap to the event producer. If you sell tickets in the province, you just became the person who decides whether a secondary market exists for your event at all.
What actually changed on 12 September
Bill 10, formally the Act to protect consumers against abusive practices related to ticket resale and online subscription renewals, passed Quebec's National Assembly 102 votes to 1 on 11 June and received assent the next day. Fasken's summary confirms most of its provisions came into force today, with a handful already live since June.
The headline rule is simple. A ticket may not be resold to a Quebec consumer above the price announced by the vendor the producer authorised. The old Consumer Protection Act already said something similar, but it only bound a "merchant". The new wording binds "no person", which sweeps in the fan with two spare seats as well as the professional broker. It also deems any platform that lets a third party list a ticket and takes the payment to be a participant in the resale, so the marketplace carries the obligations too, including a duty to make sure the seller actually holds the ticket.
The exception that makes organisers the gatekeeper
Above-face resale is not banned outright. It is allowed when three things line up: the producer (and the presenter, where there is one) has given prior written consent, the resale follows an agreement with those parties, and the buyer is told the maximum resale price the producer has set. TicketNews flagged the uncomfortable consequence: nothing in the statute obliges a producer to offer that consent to every marketplace on equal terms. An organiser could in principle bless one resale channel and leave every other platform stuck at the cap.
The Ticket Policy Forum, which speaks for StubHub, SeatGeek, Vivid Seats and the other big marketplaces, called the carve-outs a gift to Ticketmaster. Ticketmaster had not answered TicketNews's questions about how it intends to use the exception, though its Canadian help pages already show sellers' names on Quebec resale listings since 8 September. Whatever you think of the politics, the mechanics are clear: the producer is now the switch.
The disclosure rules apply to your checkout too
Resale platforms must tell a visitor, from the moment the page loads, that they are on a resale site and that tickets may be cheaper from the authorised seller. Before any resale completes, the buyer must be shown the identity of the authorised vendor, its announced price, the seat or section, the fact that the ticket is a resale, and the name of the ticket's last owner. Every reseller must also break down the total into the value of the ticket when it was issued and the nature of every fee on top.
One thing did not survive the committee stage. The original draft banned charging any fee to transfer a ticket. That was dropped and replaced with the requirement to disclose and itemise fees instead. So transfer fees are legal in Quebec; invisible ones are not.
The same Act also forces an online cancellation button onto subscription contracts and requires a notice between two and ten days before a free trial converts to a paid price. If your organisation sells memberships or season passes alongside single tickets, that part of the law lands on you as well.
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eventcloud charges one subscription with no per-ticket fees, so platform news stops being budget news.
Quebec did not abolish the secondary market. It nationalised the decision about whether one exists, and then delegated that decision to the person who put the event on.
What this means for event organisers
Pricing and cost structure. The cap is measured against "the price announced by the authorised vendor". That phrase does a lot of work. If your primary price includes a service charge, the cap includes it. If your platform bolts a booking fee onto your face value at the last screen, that fee is now part of the legal ceiling for everyone downstream, and it will be itemised on every resale listing in the province. A checkout that adds nothing has nothing to itemise. On a flat subscription there is no per-ticket fee to disclose, because there is no per-ticket fee, at 500 tickets or at 50,000. The maths is on the pricing page.
Pricing and revenue transparency. Quebec has effectively legislated the receipt. Buyers see the issue price and every fee, named. Organisers who already publish all-in prices will find nothing changes except that competitors now have to match them. Organisers whose ticket page says one number and whose confirmation email says another are about to find their buyers comparing the two.
Registration and attendee routing. The last-owner disclosure and the "seller must control the ticket" rule only work if the primary system knows who holds each ticket. Named tickets, transfer logs and a check-in list that reflects transfers are no longer nice-to-haves for a Quebec date. They are the evidence a marketplace will need from you before it lists anything.
Ease of setup. If you want a controlled resale channel, you need a written consent, an agreement and a published maximum resale price before the first ticket changes hands. That is paperwork, and it needs to exist before the onsale, not after the first complaint.
The wider trend: caps with escape hatches
Quebec is not alone, and the shape of its law is becoming the shape of everyone's law. Ontario capped resale earlier this year and then had to rewrite what "face value" meant. Vermont capped prices at independent venues. Brazil's decree last week ordered all-in pricing and free ticket transfers. California, meanwhile, killed its own 10% resale cap in committee in August and banned speculative listings instead. The pattern is a ceiling for the secondary market, an exception controlled by the primary rights-holder, and a stack of disclosure duties that push the price breakdown to the front of the screen.
For organisers the direction of travel is consistent across all of them: regulators are moving the accountability for the final price back to whoever set the first one. The organiser who can show a clean number, a clean transfer trail and a clean fee breakdown is the organiser who does not have to think about any of this again.
A soft close from someone who sells software
I will not pretend a Quebec statute changes much for a corporate conference in Leeds. But it is a useful stress test. Load your own event page, walk to the last checkout screen, and write down every number that appears between the first price and the card field. If the list is longer than one line, that is the list Quebec now requires you to print on every resale, and the list your buyers were already reading. Registration that shows one price and means it is not a compliance feature. It is just the honest version.
