Category Archives: Ontario

Ticketmaster/StubHub – Who’s Selling What Now?

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When I joined the Ticketmaster queue at 12:00 noon today, 6566 “people” were ahead of me to buy tickets in the summer 2026 Rush: Fifty Something pre-sale. So, the pre-sale probably accounted for most of the venue’s seats, and what I encountered was just for the second day out of the four in Toronto. Theoretically, there were tickets for as low as $137.75.

I joined the waiting room within seconds of it opening at 11:30. At 12:05 (in the queue for 5 minutes), it indicated that $137.75 and $173.25 tickets were limited. Clearly, StubHub, TicketSmarter, etc. reseller bots beat me in the waiting list / queue and bought up all the cheap seats first, to sell them at higher prices.

After 12 minutes, there were still 2946 “people” ahead of me, and tickets were by then “very limited.” After a 20 minute wait in the queue, the cheapest seats available to me were $417 each. After another 3 minutes, the cheapest were $608.73 each. After another 2 minutes, the cheapest thing was a hotel/tickets package for two at $1478.91.

StubHub very quickly had new tickets available for the same show on the same day, and the lowest price I saw within an hour was $380 each. A few hours later, it was $431, and StubHub also seemed to know that the event was 88% sold out. Why would a reseller know that, unless it had scooped up basically all of the tickets and replaced Ticketmaster as the seller?

I will try for tickets up to $200 again on Friday, when Ticketmaster’s “general public” sales open. I fully expect things to happen much the same as today. However, I will do a more direct comparison of actual seat-price levels on Ticketmaster and on StubHub. My guess is that their resellers are more than doubling the prices.

The US, Canadian, UK, and other governments need to put an end to the obvious “insider trading,” “antitrust,” scalper-bot shenanigans going on at Live Nation / Ticketmaster / StubHub / TicketSmarter, etc. Even if it’s currently legal, it certainly is not ethical. Actual humans should be able to buy actual tickets at the actual prices.

Ontario, Canada’s “Sunshine List”

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$100,000 is now much too low of an annual salary threshold for Ontario, Canada’s annual, public sector “Sunshine List.” In 2024, a total of 377,666 public sector employees made at least that much, up from 300,680 in 2023.

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Work Update

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Our union (0PSƏU) reps are having meetings this week with our employer (L1feL@bs) and an arbitrator. About a month ago, we overwhelmingly voted for strike action, if no new deal can be arranged. However, only about a quarter of our drivers have full-time routes, and a further quarter or so are permanent part-time (21 guaranteed weekly hours, with benefits). I assume that most of those drivers usually feel like actual employees.

About half of us are casual/on-call drivers (without benefits) and don’t necessarily get more than two shifts per week, especially outside of the summer vacation period. I’m in the bottom half of the seniority list and probably will be for quite a while. Even a permanent part-time position apparently only comes up once every year or two. Most of our part-time and casual drivers are retired or semi-retired from other things and already have pensions, other retirement savings, and benefits in place from those, not to mention being homeowners. A few of us do not have any of those things. Once my employment insurance top-up from being laid off from my last job ends in a few months, things will get very tough. I guess I need to find a second part-time job.

Our work is important: picking up medical specimens and delivering accumulated bags, sharps bags, empty bags, supplies, and reports (“mail”). A few routes have as many as 70-120 stops, but some of them are multiple doctors’ offices in larger buildings, of which some are report delivery only. Several routes each take many dozens of full bags from the Kitchener-Waterloo/Cambridge/Guelph/Fergus and surrounding area to major facilities in Etobicoke and Mississauga (about an hour or more away, in the Greater Toronto Area), where the specimens are processed. Sometimes, our manager gets stuck at the last minute having to hire a third-party company, which gets paid two to three times more than we do, even though their drivers skip many thing (e.g., sharps, empties, supplies, and mail) and frequently make mistakes.

After only about five months, I’ve already done (or, in a few cases, just been trained on) 14 of our 17 routes. However, even with extensive notes it’s hard to be efficient, stay on schedule, and get one’s breaks in when there can be a gap of up to several months before doing the same route again. Also, all routes have aspects that are illogically arranged and expected stop timings that are impossible, even for the most experienced drivers. My favourite is downtown Guelph to Rockwood back to downtown Guelph to west Waterloo in 52 minutes, including all of the time it takes to do things at these places.

We drive all over the place in all weather conditions and deal with potentially hazardous things all day (anywhere from 8 a.m. to 1:30 a.m.), but we are the company’s lowest paid employees. The company is just being sold, though, and the new owner’s US drivers actually get paid more per hour (in equivalent Canadian dollars) than we do. I hope this week’s meetings will address some of these things.

The Canada Revenue Agency and Canada Post

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The Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) won’t accept my additional employment expenses for a used vehicle I purchased in 2021 to work as a Rural and Suburban Mail Carrier (RSMC) for Canada Post for about fifteen months. I kept meticulous records about my purchase and my fuel, maintenance, and repair expenses beyond what Canada Post gave me, but the CRA claims I owe them $2,857.27. Given the number of days I worked 8, 10, or even 12 hours while only being paid for 4, 5, or 6 hours, the federal government should be paying me that amount. I’ve re-sent my paperwork both electronically and in printed form, but they’ve so far ignored my attempts to make them look at my file again. Canada Post relies on a patch-work of 8,000 mainly part-time RSMCs (70% of whom are women) who generally use their own vehicles, and I honestly don’t know how they get away with it.

Happy Canada Day

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Happy Canada Day! I see numerous Canadian flags every day I’m on my rural Ontario FedEx route. However, almost all of them are on the property, including vehicles, of freedom-convoy, anti-mandate people. The flag was established in 1965 (so was I!), the same year as universal health care and around the time that multiculturalism was starting to emerge as official policy. In 2023, there is still much to be done, especially reconciliation for indigenous peoples and addressing climate change. So, let’s celebrate openness, helping each other, and so on. The US continues to move backwards on things like abortion and LGBTQ rights, and the Canadian “freedom” enthusiasts undoubtedly wish that Canada would do the same. Let’s not do that, okay?

New Job for FedEx

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I’m now working full-time as a delivery agent for a FedEx Ground contractor. It’s for a largely rural route about 1.5 hours south/southwest of Kitchener-Waterloo-Cambridge, but including very scenic stretches along Lake Erie. I get to drive a fancy, almost-new Mercedes Benz Sprinter cargo van and use an excellent package route phone app. I also get benefits (including retirement savings) and a raise after a three-month probationary period. Thanks to Ryan and to Gerry (who put me in touch).

After over a year of getting nowhere, I got tired of working for Canada Post as an on-call relief (OCRE) rural and suburban mail carrier (RSMC). I had only occasional full-time work, no guarantee of continuing part-time work (which they told me I’d have until the end of August), no benefits, no pension, and no way to pay off the used mini-van I needed to do the job much of the time. Other times, I had to drive 20-30 year old, corporate-provided right-hand drive vehicles: Grumman LLV step-vans (which I called “ice-cream trucks”) and a rusty old Honda CRV. That FedEx can be run so much better makes me seriously question a bunch of socio-economic and political issues.

A Reflective Canada Day

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Nigel Fox, “Our Home and Native Land,” 2012

I’m glad that many Canadians are finding Canada Day to be a reflective moment about truth and reconciliation for Indigenous peoples. Mass graves of what will probably end up being thousands of residential school children have been discovered. These children were not only stolen from their families, but considered savages and allowed to die (possibly sometimes even directly killed) by members of the Christian denominations running these schools. These things were done with the knowledge and support of various Canadian governments, and the last such school closed in 1996.

The Catholic Church was the worst offender, and it should own up to it and use its considerable financial resources to do something about it. Meanwhile, Canada should at least immediately make sure that every indigenous community has access to clean drinking water and to other things that the rest of us take for granted.

My own Swiss-American ancestors settled about two hundred years ago on part of the Haldimand Tract, land that was granted to the Haudenosaunee of the Six Nations of the Grand River, within the territory of the Neutral, Anishinaabe, and Haudenosaunee peoples. 60,000 acres of Block 2 in what is now the Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario area was purchased in 1805 by Mennonite settlers who had moved there from Pennsylvania, but the area was supposed to be granted in perpetuity to the Anishinaabe people. So, these issues have been around for a very long time.

Vaccines and Politicians

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People with certain pre-existing medical conditions are three or more times as likely as the general public to die from COVID-19 once infected. (Don’t worry: I’m not infected.) All levels of government in Canada are doing terribly at dealing with the vaccines.

I get that seniors need to be the priority after frontline health-care workers and long-term care residents. However, Pfizer and Moderna have flagrantly reneged on signed agreements for delivery schedules, and things are now being delayed by weeks or months, especially for the rest of us.

So, politicians need to do something about the unexpected changes to the vaccine roll-out. I’ve been led to believe that some of them were even trained as lawyers, but I’m now guessing they became politicians because they were actually pretty bad at it.

Follow-up: It took until April 20, 2021 to get a vaccine, which was dose 1 of AstraZeneca.

Is It Time for a Guaranteed Annual Income?

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With millions of people applying for government support and millions more (like me) still earning non-living wages to provide “essential” services, it is time for Canada to have a guaranteed annual income. Give every adult $2000 a month from now on. Make it taxable, so people who already earn a lot don’t get to keep much of it. Cut the red tape. Cut the bureaucracy. Easily cover the cost by cutting the costs of having to run so many different government programs (EI, CPP, OAS, GIS, CERB, CESB, provincial welfare and disability systems, etc.).

Replacing Phoenix

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I’m glad that the Canadian government is finally replacing the Phoenix pay system. On my eight-month Master of Library & Information Science co-op placement at the Parks Canada National Library in 2017, it seriously messed up my pay. They’re replacing it with something from Germany-based company SAP. However, as someone who now uses SAP’s incredibly complex main product every day at work, I have to wonder if they can really build a system that will make sense. Part of the problem with Phoenix is that the necessary training by IBM to use it correctly was simply never done. Hopefully, SAP can build something that won’t require much training and that will just work.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/phoenix-pay-system-replacement-sap-1.5488435