Do Not Pass Go with Peter Nowak

The World Cup is over and we have a winner: after an exciting and drama-filled tournament, Spain has been crowned the ultimate champion. But there’s also a loser – and that is clearly StubHub.
The biggest name in ticket resale had issues before the World Cup, but the company is emerging from the event beset by problems of its own making. Texas and British Columbia are investigating StubHub for selling tickets that didn’t exist, consumers have filed class-action lawsuits in New York and Vancouver over the same reasons, and Ontario has added the company to its Consumer Beware List. Perhaps the most serious problem is the revelation that StubHub chief executive Eric Baker also runs a mass scalping side hustle through the website.
Many of the stories over the past few months, including the Baker bombshell, were turned up by CBC News investigative reporter Dave Seglins. His interest in the mess that is the ticketing business goes back nearly a decade further to a hidden camera investigation of a scalper convention in Las Vegas, where he and his colleagues caught Ticketmaster representatives not only encouraging mass resellers to use their platform, but recruiting them to do so.
That story figured into the recent U.S. antitrust case against Ticketmaster and its parent Live Nation, just as Seglins’ latest coverage has sparked the various government probes and lawsuits against StubHub.
No other journalist in Canada has covered this field as closely or with as much impact. In this episode, Seglins joins Do Not Pass Go to take us behind the scenes of the ticketing business, and to discuss why concerts and sporting events are deserving of serious attention from policy makers.
Check out the story on Eric Baker here, and the 2018 scalper convention investigation here. And here is the interview with Live Nation executive Dan Wall referred to in this episode.
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If you’ve got a pet in your household - and half of all Canadian households have at least one - this podcast episode is for you. We’re talking about how consolidation in the veterinary industry is rapidly driving up prices, and what’s being done about it.
A CBC investigation last year found that before 2010, almost all veterinary clinics in Canada were owned by the vets themselves. Fast forward to the present and more than half of emergency and specialty hospitals and more than 20 per cent of all clinics are owned by just six corporations.
As is the case with virtually every industry where consolidation is occurring, prices are going up – and dramatically so in this case.
A survey of pet owners last year by Gallup and PetSmart Charities of Canada found that more than half of respondents had declined recommended veterinary care or skipped a visit, with two-thirds citing cost as the reason.
Having to pay sky-high fees to get pets healthy, or worse, not being able to afford the cost of doing so, is often devastating to families.
The rolling up of the industry is getting a lot of attention as a result and it’s inevitable that regulators and governments are going to start investigating. Maybe some will take action. But in the meantime, some of those still independent vets are trying to disrupt this norm.
Emma Harris is the chief executive and, along with Dr. Brendon Laing, the co-founder of Novel, a new vet clinic that opened last year in Burlington, Ont.
As the name implies, they’re trying to do the vet business a bit differently, driven largely by the desire to make sure that pet care is affordable so that families don’t have to make that terrible decision of foregoing treatment with their fur babies.
Harris is also finishing up her PhD at the Ontario Veterinary College at the University of Guelph, where her thesis delves into the growing overlap of vet care and big business.
She’s the perfect person to talk about how private equity is driving up the cost of pet care but also investing in necessary advancements, and how disruption and better clinics may be the best counter to industry consolidation.
Check out Novel here and a Globe and Mail feature on the clinic here.
CORRECTION: A previous version of the show notes for this episode referred to Dr. Laing as Ms. Harris’ husband. They are not, in fact, married. We regret the error. An audio clarification will be made in the next episode.
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In December last year, Ubisoft Halifax employees voted overwhelmingly in favour of establishing a union – 74 per cent said yes. Just a few weeks later, the French company shut the studio down and laid off everyone.
Legal action followed, which the two sides settled in April, only for Ubisoft to then close its Winnipeg studio in June, laying off a further 65 employees.
Those layoffs – more than 45,000 globally since 2022, with 8,200 so far this year including Microsoft’s news this week of an additional 3,200 Xbox cuts – are what’s driving the unionization push, not just at Ubisoft but across the industry.
Employees at U.S. studios owned by Activision Blizzard, ZeniMax Media and Sega of America have all unionized recently. Last year, workers in the United States and Canada partnered with the Communications Workers of America to announce the United Videogame Workers-CWA Local 9433, marking the historic launch of an industry-wide labour movement.
In this episode, Ubisoft Halifax lead programmer and union leader Jon Huffman takes us behind the scenes of the studio’s move to get organized, and he explains how consolidation and financialization are forcing workers across the industry to finally fight back.
Check out Huffman’s new independent games studio, Phantom Rowboat.
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The NDP took a drubbing in the last federal election, suffering its worst defeat in history. The party lost 17 seats, with its share of the popular vote falling by two-thirds to just 6.3 per cent.
Some of that was because many Canadians got spooked by Donald Trump’s 51st state rhetoric, so they rallied behind the Liberal party to prevent a Conservative win. But part of it was also because, as many within the NDP openly admitted, the party had lost its way - it was no longer representing the interests of regular Canadians.
At the same time, in Manitoba, premier Wab Kinew has been enjoying some pretty significant support. He’s regularly showing up as the most popular premier in the country in polls, an obvious beacon of success for the NDP in Canada.
That popularity is the result of his tackling the issue that is top of mind for the vast majority Canadians: affordability.
Since taking office in 2023, Kinew’s government has passed a raft of pro-consumer and anti-monopoly legislation. From taking on grocery chains and the restrictive land contracts that prevent competition, to banning surveillance pricing and giving farmers the ability to repair their own tractors, the province been on a mission to counter the effects of market concentration.
The federal party and Kinew’s counterparts in the other provinces have not only taken notice, but they’re adopting the same playbook.
This past spring in Winnipeg, Avi Lewis won the federal NDP leadership and has since adopted many of the same positions on a national level. He’s in favour of municipally run grocery stores, a total ban on surveillance pricing, and publicly owned telecom providers, among other measures.
In Ontario, Stiles is pushing a similar agenda. Her party has introduced bills on right to repair, cutting taxes on groceries and the establishment of programs to cut energy bills.
She joins the Do Not Pass Go podcast for a wide-ranging discussion on how the NDP is tying a hoped-for rebound to a focus on competition and affordability issues.
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Want to cancel your phone or internet service? Better carve out a serious chunk of time for calling in to plead and argue with a customer agent.
The irony is that same service might have taken only seconds to sign up for online in the first place. And it’s not just telecom, it’s widespread. Satellite radio, gym memberships, newspaper subscriptions – there are no shortages of businesses in Canada that purposely make it delightfully easy for customers to come on board, but dreadfully difficult to leave.
As usual, Canada is lagging while other countries are moving to protect consumers from such predatory tactics. Fortunately, there’s a bright spot on the horizon, as the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission recently announced new regulations that will force telecom providers to make it easy for customers to change or cancel their services online without having to call in to speak with an agent.
These so-called “click-to-cancel” rules are the first federal effort to address the scourge of consumer lock-in, but they aren’t coming into effect until April 2027 and they only apply to telecom companies.
Tahira Dawood, acting director of the Public Interest Advocacy Centre consumer rights group, joins the Do Not Pass Go podcast to discuss why Canada is so behind and why click-to-cancel rules are broadly needed throughout the economy.
Check out the Competition Bureau’s recent paper on dark patterns here.
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