Ottawa taxi baron leads national effort against Uber ride sharing program
Canadian taxi companies are banding together to fight the threat of Uber, reviving a dormant national association once formed to battle the GST.
The headquarters of the overhauled Canadian Taxi Association? Here in Ottawa in the offices of Coventry Connections, whose fleets include Blue Line, Capital, DJ’s and West-Way.
It’s partly a self-help organization for members to share lessons about business practices and new technology. But mainly it’s about Uber, the U.S.-based company whose smartphone app lets passengers summon cars from freelance drivers who aren’t licensed cabbies.
“It’s a common voice. We’re taking feedback from operators from one end of the country to the other. How are they dealing with it in their cities, how are we dealing with it? What are you saying to your regulators?” says Marc-Andre Way, a vice-president of Coventry Connections and the national association’s president. “The association is regrouping all the operators together so we are all talking from a common point of view.”
The board of the association has members from Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Montreal and Halifax. Besides comparing notes, they can pool resources to hire their own lobbyists and spokespeople. One of Uber’s Canadian people is Susie Heath, who spoke for Ontario Finance Minister Charles Sousa until she left last winter; the hired PR man spreading the word about the taxi association is Jeff Silverstein, an ex-journalist who worked for then-Toronto mayor Rob Ford and his brother Doug in their effort to keep Toronto’s mayoralty in the family.
(I know, I know. But whatever you think of the Fords, they had some smart people.)
Way is a living symbol of how baroque the taxi industry has become. Capital Taxi is Way’s family business and they’ve owned it for three generations. Way is also vice-president of Coventry, which dispatches Blue Line, Capital, DJ’s, West-Way and the airport fleet — pretty well all the taxis in Ottawa — in addition to taxi services across southern Ontario and also does towing and garage work here and there. Coventry’s boss is Hanif Patni, the president of Blue Line.
Competition has been negligible, which is why Uber’s been like a racehorse overtaking a nag. Uber rides are easy to order and typically cheaper than taxis — partly because the company’s good at what it does, but partly because Uber drivers don’t pay the steep fees taxi drivers do for the right to drive.
The city-issued taxi plates or medallions that limit the number of approved taxis on the road represent a lot of wealth. Way estimates an Ottawa plate is worth between $150,000 and $225,000, though they don’t change hands much and Uber’s arrival makes their real value uncertain. Way’s family owns 87 plates, he says, meaning they have a lot invested in keeping a limited market. He insists protecting the value of plates isn’t the point, that unlike for absentee plate owners, profits from actually operating a legit taxi company are a bigger deal.
“We stay in the community. We work in the community, we invest in the community,” he says.
Taxi companies deal with different rules all across Canada: in Ontario, the regulations on them are almost all municipal; in Quebec outside Montreal, they’re almost all provincial (Montreal is its own taxi kingdom). Elsewhere, it’s a mix. Uber can choose where to pick fights it thinks it can win. Taxi companies see themselves as sitting ducks.
“Most of us are more than willing that if someone in Red Deer, Alberta, needs assistance to speak to council, one of us will take a plane and go down and lobby on behalf of the industry to make sure the right message comes across,” Way says.
Although they’re working on it now that they’re under pressure, taxi companies have been appallingly slow to modernize.
“That is something that we’ve realized a few years ago. Many many years ago,” Way says. “The industry has been slowly, probably too slow, working at reinventing itself to satisfy the customers today versus 30 or 40 years ago or 20 years ago. Technology has changed. Most of us are very, very adept to technology and we’re using it. The app and the smartphone have thrown into the mix a whole different angle as to how to connect customers to taxis. … Does it need to be refined? Absolutely. And that’s why the association is again a good thing.”
If that’s really what it does, great. If the association only tries to protect an industry with regulations that its members can’t maintain with good business, well, we’ll know who to blame.