The art of the possible

On Wednesday, June 17, in the city hall square, there was a demonstration of taxi drivers in support of Ambassador driver Assafo Addai’s Human Rights claim that he has been deprived of an equity taxicab plate because he is black. Perhaps 200, mostly non-white drivers were there, most or perhaps all of them Ambassadors. They were present to uphold a position that they must have seen as an impending bonanza - the aquisition of a standard taxicab plate - for themselves.

The demonstrators carried placards that shouted the message they wanted to get across: “Stop Discrimination Against Ambassador Driver,” “Respect the Toronto Taxi Drivers’ Human Rights,” “Justice Demands One Law For All,” and “Convert Ambassador Plate to Standard Plate.”

Inside City Hall, where the wheels turn, Assafo Addai, an African-Canadian Ambassador driver, accompanied by his wife, did not do quite so well in a mediation meeting before a Human Rights Tribunal. As I am told, the City’s lawyer simply told the tribunal that Assafo’s claim was without substance and refused to mediate anything, the apparent meaning being the City will be quite happy to let a higher court settle the matter - some time into the very distant future. Basically, this is the City’s standard tactic in cases that might cost money, big or small. Their game is to wear the opposition out by wearing out its money resource. If you don’t believe this is so, ask Wilma Walsh and the Drivers on the Waiting List about the City’s treatment of them and its handling of their law suit.

My information is that Assafo has 35 days to decide whether or not to go to court at some higher level and that all of the legal variations that he now faces are likely to be quite expensive - with Assafo himself having to pay the costs, if he wants to press his claim further.

One thing that’s mildly interesting about this contest is that it seems essentially to pit one type of leftwinger against another - in a time of everyday cutbacks, strikes and ever-rising taxes.

As I see it, the obvious reason Assafo and his fellow travellers didn’t get an equity plate is that they came too late to the dance. The City long ago grossly exceeded a reasonable number of equity plates in its taxi system - in fact, we passed the danger end of the usual ratio for a large a North American city in 1987, when Toronto, for the second time in five years, issued 500 equity plates without any kind of proper study. This was done for reasons that had nothing to do with the well-being of the paying public or the well-being of the generality of people who work in the taxi industry.

To say that doesn’t mean I don’t recognize that the City is exploiting its cabbies and that the non-white people who now make up most of the taxi industry workforce are not easy targets for such exploitation. It certainly is the case, as I have written more than a few times before. And I certainly think, and have written, that there is much worse planned for them.

Fair play the City of Toronto knows little or nothing about, so far as taxi drivers are concerned.

Fairly obviously, though, there are already 50 percent or more too many cabs in our taxi system. We are feeling it badly now - and it’s going to get much worse before it gets better. If there were 3,000 cabs in Toronto, not 5,000, we would all still be making some kind of a living. Now, once again, as in 1989-1994, Toronto taxi drivers are starving. And, make no mistake, this was meant to be so.

I might say I know Assafo Addai a little bit, and worked with him a few years back in an effort to stanch the activities of two policemen who really were ticketing cabbies for the money they could make by going to court on their days off.

The thing I like about Assafo is that he’s got more guts than almost any cab driver I can name. I can’t say I like the rightness of his present claim, though, because I don’t.

Like all the Ambassadors, Assafo has been taken to the cleaners by the City and, having figured that out, he doesn’t like it. His problem is he hasn’t analyzed the situation properly - and hasn’t found a viable way out of the situation the City has inflicted on himself and many others.

And, like so many other cabbies in the past, he doesn’t much care about the effect of his solution to his problems on others in the industry.

Politics has been characterized as the Art of the Possible.

Assafo and friends have not grasped what’s possible and what isn’t. If he, or anyone else, puts money into this claim, they will lose it for no gain at all.