Make no mistake, standard plates are hard-earned, very personal property

In 1998, at the time of the Task Force to Review the Toronto Taxi Industry, I sat beside Councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong while he told a small room full of taxi industry people what he thought they needed to know: that Toronto’s taxicab plates belonged to the City of Toronto.

And I wish now that I had then interrupted with the obvious pregnant question: “Mr. Minnan-Wong, sir, if the City owns the plates, how and why is it that the plate-owners are collecting the rents?”

And still are.

All of my 27 years in the industry up to that time, taxicab plates were bought and sold between individuals, and spoken of as their private property, their legal asset, and all the City did, and still does, was take a large nick of several thousand dollars each time a plate changed hands.

The plate owners had their numbered plates - on the backs of their cabs - and those plates were spoken of as theirs. You’d hear people say, “That’s Joe’s plate,” or Willie’s, or Frank’s - and there was never anybody who said, “That’s the City’s plate.” Why? Because the City itself had taught the taxi owners and drivers to think and speak in those terms - over a period of many years.

You started learning it the day you arrived at “the Office.”

I remember well the day in 1971 when I first attended the kind of taxi school the City of Toronto had at that time. It was in a small upstairs office at 240 Eglinton East - five City licensing offices ago. I remember the instructor giving 25 or 30 of us beginners a little speech that went about like this:

“The taxi business is a great business. You can be in it full-time, part-time, or you can make it your career. If you choose to make it your career, you have to drive for three years and then you can put your name on The List for a taxi plate. If after that you work for a number of years in good standing, a minimum five (12-hour) days a week, when your turn comes, a taxi plate will be issued to you. Then you are on probation for five years. If you continue in good standing and have no serious problems or complaints, then the plate will be yours after that time. When you retire, you can sell the plate and live on that money in your old age.”

Those were essentially the words and ideas the man spoke - and I have information from drivers that this same instruction was given into the early 1990s. When this stopped, I don’t know.

And that is, too, how a Toronto taxicab plate came to be thought of as a taxi driver’s “pension” - so far as I know.

There was nothing said at that time about the leasing of taxicab plates, which I believe was illegal at that time, but a common practice then that has continued to this day, and which City Council did not disturb at the time of the task force.

I have no sense at all that, to this day, Toronto standard taxicab plates are not private property.

•••••

Well, I almost vomited.

I was reading John Duffy’s story “iTaxiworkers’ big plans,” in last month’s Taxi News, about the iTaxiworkers’ meeting held at the offices of the Ontario Federation of Labour, July 27, and I was noticing how chummy the iTaxiworkers were getting with Howard Moscoe, when, towards the back of the story, as Duffy reported, Moscoe went to the podium and, after a session of questions, told the meeting that the Ambassador program of 1998 was for him, a “second best proposal.”

“What we wanted to do was have the City take back all Standard plates and lease them to the drivers for $600 a month,” Howie is quoted as saying. “$300 per month per plate would go to paying back the debt to owners for the lost plates, and $300 per month would go to setting up a pension plan and benefit package for drivers.”

Then, as Duffy reports, Moscoe told the assembly the City legal department quashed the idea, saying the City could not legally do it.

Imagine the City legal department thinking the City couldn’t seize people’s private property and give them small value for it?

And imagine Howie thinking the City could?

Moscoe said at the July 27 meeting, “At the time we intended to return the industry to the people who drove the vehicles.”

So, as it happened, What did they do?

They issued 1,400-odd Ambassador “permits” (a barely viable business) into an already badly over-supplied market, made it much more difficult for all 10,500 Toronto taxi drivers to make a living - and just as a sort of unintended consequence of the City’s and Howie’s grand intentions, the City upped the amount of money in licensing fees it takes from the taxi industry by over 500 percent. That is, the City collected $1.75 million a year from the industry in 1998 and is now collecting $8.8 million in 2010. The driver, of course, in the end, pays it all - and look what they did to the drivers’ livelihood at the same time.

The proof is in the pudding. The best thing anyone could say about Howard Moscoe is that he has had all the chances “to put plates in the hands of the drivers” that he deserves and, at the very best, he has proven himself incompetent.

The truth is 1998 was really about “getting plate values down” - at any cost to any taxi driver - so the City itself could buy back the plates and use them as a money-making device for itself.

The Ambassador program was, and is, a cash cow for the City at the driver’s expense - and now Howie is going around acting surprised and saying there are too many cabs on the streets.

As if he had nothing to do with it...

•••••

Also quoted by John Duffy as talking about possibly expropriating present owners’ licenses at the self-same meeting - but only possibly - and preferring to give the plate owner two years to make a forced sale “to some qualified individual” - was Peter Rosenthal, lawyer for the iTaxiworkers. Evidently, Mr. Rosenthal is not too impressed with the standard plates as private property either.

Rosenthal doesn’t seem to know who these owners are and is quoted as saying “most (cabs) are not driven by the owners ... who just make money off the drivers.”

Some of them are the drivers who were in my class in 1971, or other classes like that, who were, in effect, told: If you structure your entire working life around living in a cab 12 hours a day, a taxi plate will be yours after many years of hard labour.

They’ve already done the work on the deal they were offered. Which one of those people can go back and live their life over?

Take away the plate they earned, and what have they got?

There are other ways to fix the mess that’s been created than by taking away what belongs to somebody else.