FIRST THEY CAME FOR OUR CABBIES

How Progress Killed an Industry and Broke my Heart.

I’m home again in Toronto after yet another bumpy Via Rail ride from Ottawa. I left on Wednesday to be back for an event, was late and dashed uptown in a taxi wearing workout/travel clothes, very likely smelling of popcorn. At one point, my kindly driver pulled over so I could retrieve my suitcase from the trunk and do a full makeup in the back seat. In the olden days on the way to a television gig, I might have also changed my top — but I’m no longer that bold.

Union Station in Toronto hosts a lovely but antiquated relic from the near past — a taxi stand — with cabs waiting to spirit tired passengers away. I hate Uber - and still have a profound love for taxi culture. I initially fought hard to keep Uber out of this city. But progress no matter how regressive, always wins these days. The drivers staged protests eerily similar to the trucker convoy but to no avail. The shiny new thing is always adopted by politicians, media and young people who believe only in technological innovation, no matter how cruel.

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My heart broke for the hardworking cabbies whose lives changed almost overnight because a couple of young, techno-brained hotshots in California created an app. Of course, John Tory caved to the Uber lobby and now it’s hard to even find a cab in Toronto, except at designated pick up points.

And I mourn the lingering death of an industry with which I had a profound relationship. Before I go on with my personal story about how two Toronto taxi dispatchers saved my career, let me outline the near-criminal way Uber successfully schemed to take over our cities and destroy the taxi business.

Like Air B and B and its original lie about home-sharing — when it is a actually a home-renting business (with an app), Uber cleverly used the phrase ride-sharing to falsely differentiate Uber from taxis — thus gaining its unfair stronghold over our streets.

This study highlights how sneaky was Uber’s entry into cities, like Toronto and New York.

In Toronto, Uber was eventually legalized in 2016 after “months of protest and turmoil” and years of debate while it operated illegally.

But when we began studying Uber’s entry into Toronto, we noticed something concerning. There was increasing praise in the media for Uber and Uber drivers, but criticism and near-contempt for taxis and taxi drivers.

How were two groups of people doing the same work every day — driving other people to their desired destinations — being perceived so differently? As one Uber driver told us in an interview: “I don’t see the difference. … There is no difference between each other.” But it seemed the media and Uber disagreed.

The other lie, of course was that Uber drivers are only part time. And this same study found that somehow the stigma of cab driving didn’t transfer if media and the public thought the drivers were only dabbling — which they mostly aren’t. Just more lies from a greedy tech company pulling one over on all of us with help from the laptop class always denigrating working people.

In the meantime drivers in major cities were committing suicide over losing their livelihoods and I suspect were feeling massively betrayed by the places they served and where they had built a business and their lives.

How East End Taxi Saved My Career

Back in the day, when I worked at CBC, East End Taxi picked me up every morning. I got to know the drivers and they worked hard, making a decent living that sent many of their kids to university. They owned bungalows in Scarborough and collected taxi plates that could grow into a lucrative business. A few seemed to spend a significant amount of time at the racetrack and many were interesting characters with a great backstory. For immigrants — driving taxi was a way to launch a blue collar family into the middle class. I knew their kids’ names, their dreams and sometimes the tragedies that befell them.

We always stopped so I could grab coffee — double double —and then I would slip into the back seat, with a Players Light and sit back for the $8.00 trip to CBC - chatting with my driver about the news of the day. It was pure pleasure and I got to relax like a queen for about 20 minutes. I also learned they know way more about sensible foreign policy than the fools who make it — because it is the citizens on the ground who are ruined by the West’s misbegotten war fantasies. Some of them end up over here, driving cab.

In the early 1990s — East End Taxi performed a miracle that saved my bacon. The night before I was to fly off to Rwanda for a shoot, I’d gone for a rather boozy dinner in my favourite resto on Toronto’s Danforth Avenue, near my house. After dinner, my then-husband and I hailed an anonymous taxi and headed home. Not long after we got in, I realized I’d left my handbag in the cab — with $9,000 in American cash from the CBC, tucked away for my trip the next day. Sadly, it was a gypsy cab, meaning that the taxi company wasn’t clearly marked on the vehicle so I didn’t know whom to call.

I remember vaguely lying on the kitchen floor, hysterical as I saw my entire career flash before my eyes. Surely, as a journalist I was toast. Tomorrow, I would report the loss to the Mother Corp, be summoned to the CBC death-star on Front Street and then canned.

But I had an idea. I called the dispatcher at East End whom I knew well and explained what happened. In a flash of critical thinking, he figured out the name of the cab company in question based on the description of the car and where it had been trolling. Then — even better — he called and spoke to the dispatcher there and they determined who had my purse. The driver had quit early for the night, right after our trip, and had taken my bag with the cash envelope home. Done and done. Case solved.

Can you imagine Uber making an effort like this for a customer? They still owe me for a meal one of their driver’s stole and I am assuming ate himself — which is fine, I suppose. But companies like Uber rely on the fact we now feel powerless and they know the effort to communicate with huge tech corporations is so onerous and impersonal that we write-off our losses. Do you return to Amazon things that are wrong? Do you follow up to get small refunds you are owed? I will guess that ten percent of their revenue comes from people too frustrated to even attempt to traverse the ordeal of communicating with AI or some teenager in a call centre or on anonymous email.

My handbag and the cash were returned to me that night and I paid a reward, not knowing if the person who delivered it was the person who’d taken it home. It didn’t matter. The day was saved!

It was comforting when my Wednesday night taxi driver didn’t balk at my request to stop the car and retrieve my suitcase so I could gussy up in the back seat. It was kind of charming and somewhat retro. When I left the event later there were no cabs to hail even on a very busy street so I was reduced to ordering a you-know-what. Not the driver’s fault but I felt a little resentful and kind of sad all the way home.

East End Taxi is long gone but I still have its number etched in my brain. 694-XXXX was for the ViPs and that night 30 years ago, they sure made me feel like one.

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