Ottawa Sun
Published: Saturday, March 5, 2005

I'll take cab drivers over political hacks anyday

Taxi, taxi, why can't I hail a cab? Why is the cabstand beside my office building almost empty? Ottawans will soon be asking these questions just as Blue Line cab customers in Gloucester and those who rely on Capital Taxi were doing this past week.

Ottawa's taxi industry is broken: An assertion that I've made in half a dozen columns over the past four years. The blame for this lies with the former municipalities -- before municipal amalgamation -- who turned a blind eye to the accumulation of "taxi plates" by enterprising business types who in turn made a small fortune from selling and leasing these plates back to cab drivers.

City hall has already done its best (read: worst) to try and imitate the invisible hand of the market by telling cabbies what colours their cars should be, imposing a maximum age for cars on the road and determining base fares. And voila, our cab industry is still broken. Now the new bosses/owners at Capital Taxi and Blue Line are about to continue the assault on hard-working cabbies in terms of the range of increased licence and dispatch service fees they plan to foist upon drivers.

Sixty-five Blue Line Gloucester drivers are already locked out and another 218 Capital drivers have now joined them in this plight. And now there are rumblings of a one-day solidarity work stoppage next week by 900 Blue Line Ottawa drivers.

In Gloucester, Blue Line wants to hike the monthly dispatch service fee from $230 to $320 (a whopping 39% hike) and jack the monthly taxi plate rental fee by a staggering 139% from $142 to $340 a month. Other regressive issues -- according to drivers -- on the table include a proposal for a six-month collective agreement (there goes job security) and an extra 6% transaction charge to cash government taxi chits and credit card vouchers, yikes!

Most readers will know that I'm no fan of organized labour, but in an environment such as this, is it any wonder that cabbies have a union? And more power to you brothers, solidarity forever!

Over at Capital Taxi, if the ownership group gets its way, drivers who own their own vehicles and who own their own taxi plates will have to use company cars, leave theirs at home, and relinquish their plates for the privilege of renting 12-hour shifts from the company at a cost of $91 per shift.

Many of these drivers recently purchased new vehicles to conform to the new city-imposed maximum seven-year vehicle age standards and those who own their plates purchased them (in many instances by taking second mortgages on their properties for $50,000 to $70,000) in the hopes of reselling them once their driving days are done. It's the cab industry's version of the RRSP retirement nest egg.

Sadly, the public has shown little empathy or sympathy for the plight of our cabbies. However, imagine if you were sitting behind the wheel in their seats.

You work long 12- to 16-hour days in what always seem to be tough times. You fork out hundreds of dollars a month in fees and charges for the "privilege' of working these crazy hours. And depending on your shift, you sometimes transport irritable and abusive business types or drunken college students here and there. To add to your woes, you've seen gas prices jump by 80% in six years, insurance rates double over the past two years and languish under a business-killing fare structure.

To top it all off, you work in a city where most of the local politicians who regulate your industry have never met a payroll and have no comprehension of the owner-operator concept.

Yes, solidarity forever indeed when it comes to our cabbies!