When did Uber become the Law?
We are still a nation of Rule of Law and elected government
When did Uber become the law?
An Uber driver in British Columbia is ticketed for breaking the law, and the case goes all the way to the BC Supreme Court. The definition of “distracted driving” never changed, but Uber drivers need to violate BC’s distracted driving law in order to drive for Uber. Therefore, if I am reading the CBC story correctly, we need to change the distracted driving laws.
In London, Ontario, city government decides to increase the per-trip fee it charges Uber. Uber takes the City of London to court, for the offense of creating a law Uber does not like.
In Ontario, where Uber drivers drove without insurance for three years because insurance is expensive, Ontario re-wrote its insurance regulations to allow “usage based insurance” for the first time in history.
The City of Toronto used to demand every Vehicle for Hire driver show proof of insurance. Now, Toronto only demands Taxi and Limo drivers show proof of insurance; Uber keeps the top-secret list of drivers it claims are insured under its usage based insurance agreement with Economical Insurance. Even Economical does not have a list of the drivers insured by Uber. How does that work?
When Ontario decided Uber drivers working in Ontario should earn minimum wage, it considerately re-defined the word “work” by inventing the concept of “engaged time.” Uber drivers are therefore only entitled to minimum wage for the minutes they have a fare in the car, not any of the minutes waiting around for a fare or driving empty. (By this logic, politicians would only need to be paid for the seconds they spend actually voting.)
For some mysterious reason, the fact that new technologies can be described as “novel” has hypnotized elected officials and career bureaucrats into some kind of helpless paralysis. Newsflash: governments have been dealing with “novel” ideas since the Sumerians began codifying laws on clay tablets. Just having a law, obeying the law and enforcing the law are not complicated concepts necessitating a whole new level of government-by-corporation.
Maybe none of this would bother me if Uber was actually doing a better job running ground transportation than our democratically elected governments were doing pre-2014, but that is not the case.
The nightmare stories I hear from Uber drivers sicken me; the complaints being posted online to sites like Facebook and YouTube are beyond the pale.
Every morning that I wake up, I am buffeted with a series of emailed articles reporting on the most recent egregious offenses by Uber corporately (which is brazen about its search for loopholes to evade the law); Uber drivers (like the one in London Ontario who took advantage of his professional status as an Uber driver/Human Trafficker to attempt to lure teen-age girls into prostitution); or unhappy Uber customers (like those complaining that Uber charges more during snowstorms).
Welcome to Government by Uber.
For the past decade in Canada, it seems, citizens and consumers were largely fine with having an enormous corporation financially abuse the drivers it coerced with false information about income potential. We’re also OK with allowing elected government to be bullied by lawfare launched against officials duly elected to represent their jurisdictions.
But 2025 is a new year. The United States has a new President. Canada is going to get a new Prime Minister.
In 2025, we have a new chance to stop pretending Uber is a law unto itself, and should actually insist Uber obey the laws our governments create.
Consumers should stop pretending that door-to-door service could ever possibly cost as little as $2.97, and swallow the fact that they should expect to pay more.
Uber drivers should stop pretending they are innocent of decimating the legally regulated Taxi industry and the very regulations they now want to have expanded to protect them from Uber.
Uber behaving badly is not news: it’s what we should expect because we handed over law-making authority to a foreign corporation whose motive is control and profit, not service in a civil society.
Personally, as my New Year’s resolution for 2025, I refuse to treat predictable stories of Uber greed and lawlessness as news stories. None of this is news. For my own mental health and that of Taxi News readers, I’m going to stop pretending it is news.
At least, we can stop pretending.
