Contempt for Ottawa’s by-laws and your intelligence beggars belief

Making any sort of recording of a court proceeding in Canada without the express written permission of the Justice is highly illegal and could lead to contempt of court charges and arrest.

So, Taxi News has created this “re-enactment” of plaintiff counsel Abdalla Barquawi’s illustration of how much work Ottawa has gone to in order to develop a Taxi by-law which will cover every possible scenario in the ground transportation business. It is simply “not plausible,” Barquawi noted, that Ottawa would have invested this much work over half of a century to develop such by-laws, only to disregard them completely when a foreign corporation rolled in to town to set up a Taxi business while ignoring every section of the very by-laws the City had painstakingly developed.

In his presentation on November 29th, counsel for Ottawa Todd Burke noted repeatedly that it is not Ottawa’s job to “protect the investments” of Taxi owners, or “do a perfect job” enforcing Ottawa’s by-law. He appeared simply not to notice that Ottawa never once charged Uber itself with studiously ignoring the City’s detailed, meticulous standards for professionals who transport passengers for compensation.

“Ottawa was willfully blind,” Abdalla Barquawi noted. “Willfully blind to the actions of Uber, and willfully blind to the Plaintiff class,” owners and operators in the Taxi industry.