[URBAN NOTE] "Frustrated by cabbie protests? Good, that’s the point"

[rfmcdonald]

The Toronto Star's Desmond Cole looks at the desperation behind the anti-Uber protests of taxi drivers, making a case that they have good reason to feel an existential threat to their livelihoods. Whether or not they have a chance regardless is a different question.

Toronto deserves three stars (out of a possible four) for its convincing performance of outrage during Wednesday’s traffic-halting taxi demonstration. We’re classically trained to scoff at public protest, to say its practitioners are driving us away instead of winning us over. But I have to hold back on that last star. While our acting is world-class, the storyline — the one that suggests the public has more claim to outrage than taxi drivers — just isn’t believable.

We naively perceive demonstrations like the taxi protest as a sales pitch, a 30-second window to mobilize the public with sharp arguments and little inconvenience. Protests almost always have the opposite goal: to disrupt daily life, to give a voice to people we regularly fail to sympathize with. A good protest is not a window of opportunity to make change, but a mirror reflecting our values and the consequences of our actions.

Yes, the cab drivers will lose more business because they broke Toronto’s 11th commandment, “Thou shalt not obstruct the roadway.” Yes, more people will likely withdraw their business in favour of UberX, a popular division of the rogue transportation service that licensed cabbies say is ruining them. Cabbies know that better than we do.

They also know that even in a city brimming with cash, residents value a cheap chauffeur over sustainable employment. Instead of accepting Darwin’s theory of economics, or trying to find an alternative within it, cabbies suggest the system is broken, and that we are wrong for supporting it. Do we really expect them to entertain us with a song about their situation, which we are complicit in maintaining?

Even people who prefer UberX or other transportation services to city-licensed taxis cannot ignore the way taxi drivers in Toronto are being abused. Licensed taxis are highly regulated: they must collect HST, own commercial insurance, and undergo regular vehicle inspections. If drivers don’t follow the bylaws, the city can simply take away their licenses and livelihood. UberX dodged these rules for a full year in Toronto, and city officials say Uber is in violation of a new bylaw council adopted in September.