John Tory says Uber injunction not on the table

Toronto mayor says the answer to Uber protests culminating at city hall this week is a swift change to city regulations, which is in process.

Thestar.com
Dec. 4, 2015
By Jennifer Pagliaro

As a city hall protest by taxi drivers came to a head Friday afternoon, Mayor John Tory said it’s up to the city’s lawyers to decide whether to push for an injunction against the controversial UberX service.

“If the city’s lawyers thought it was in our best interest to seek an injunction, and they thought we had a good chance of winning the injunction ... I’m sure they’d be giving us that advice,” Tory said, speaking to the Star from Paris, where he is attending a cities gathering in connection with the global climate talks.

“Calgary and Toronto are different places,” he said referring to a temporary injunction sought in the Alberta city against UberX.

Drivers and owners of traditional cabs, who must compete with the unregulated service, have been decrying Uber this week, including several men who had been carrying on a hunger strike that ended Friday. The city is currently working to bring Uber under city regulations.

This summer, a Superior Court judge ruled that both Uber and UberX are operating legally as companies, after the city launched a legal challenge. The ruling acknowledges that the technology company, which lets anyone hail a licensed taxi or unlicensed driver using a mobile app, was not a taxi brokerage and therefore not required to follow the same rules.

Since then, city council, led by Tory, has been trying to close that loophole, voting in September to incorporate Uber and companies like it under revised bylaws governing who is required to apply for a licence to operate a taxi or limousine brokerage.

To date, however, Uber has not applied for such a licence, and the city’s municipal licensing and standards division has said only that it is engaged in talks with the company.

Cab drivers and the taxi lobby say it’s not enough. While the city works on more complicated regulations that would also see UberX brought into the legal fold, those supporting traditional cabs say drivers operating illegally, without proper commercial insurance, should be stopped and the service temporarily halted.

That frustration brought a few dozen drivers to the rotunda of city hall on Friday, where protests have occasionally been staged. The drivers shouted and cursed the city and Tory, arguing their livelihoods are at stake.

Last month, the licensing division, which also handles enforcement, said the number of UberX drivers charged has seen only a slight increase since this summer, putting the total at 104.

Still, Tory said Friday those charges are sending a message.

“I’ve said before, not on their behalf, but just looking at it objectively and realistically, it is not going to be possible to go and give a ticket to every Uber driver and every Uber user, because there are hundreds of thousands of users and tens of thousands of drivers,” Tory said. “We are working as fast as we can” to achieve new regulations that level the playing field, he said.

Tory said he knows traditional cab drivers are angry and struggling. “But the protests and the shouting and so on are not going to speed up the process of carefully drafting regulations on a very complex issue.”

After meeting with other big city mayors in Paris, Tory said, he will be returning with the conviction that Toronto needs to regain its status as a leader in climate change on the world stage.

“We should get back at things we were doing quite well,” he said of the pre-Rob Ford years. “Toronto was seen as being in the forefront of making some of the changes, whether it had to do with tree planting, or (deep) water cooling or various things like that, or even waste diversion. And it kind of stalled out. There wasn’t much leadership over the last little while.”

He said he will be bringing back three key messages: preserving the environment, conserving energy, and saving money while doing so - “because in almost every case you can save money.”

The mayor said he hopes to convince even those who don’t see the environment as a priority that there are good financial reasons to back green initiatives, such as the massive work of retrofitting Toronto Community Housing buildings.

Tory left for Paris the same day he announced plans to create a new property tax levy that would fund capital spending on transit and housing.

Since then, councillors have said they’ll support the move, but more needs to be done to cover a growing list of approved priorities that will cost more than $23 billion.

Tory reiterated that he’s open to looking at other “revenue tools” such as a hotel tax or levy on commercial parking, but said he doesn’t have a set list in mind.

“I haven’t given really any thought at all to which ones might be better than others,” he said. “I did invite the city councillors, staff of the city and people out there in the community to make their own suggestions known.”

Some ideas will require more work than others, he acknowledged, including some measures that need the province’s approval.

At least one item seems off the table: Tory says the vehicle registration tax brought in under former mayor David Miller and later killed by Ford has become a “toxic” debate at council.