Valuating Taxi plates key topic in Ottawa court case

Professor of Finance Martin Boyer spent several hours providing testimony on the valuation of Taxi plates on March 30th.

Martin Boyer was previously qualified as an expert witness in many court cases, including the case involving Québec taxi plate owners (propriétaires de permis de taxi) against the Government of Québec when taxi plates were abolished.

Professor Boyer participated in the Ministère des finances du Québec technical group discussions
that led to the implementation of the first $250 million program that sought to compensate taxi
plate owners for the partial loss of their livelihood after the arrival of Uber in the province of
Québec, and in Montréal in particular. The approach used to establish compensation for taxi
plate owners is almost identical to the one he proposed to the government in May 2018 on behalf
of the plate owners’ attorneys.

Below is the summary of Boyer’s analysis:

“Taxi plates are financial assets. They do not have value on their own, but they allow their owner to receive the proceeds of an economic activity.

Absent a vibrant and liquid secondary resale market for taxi plates populated by atomistic traders, their value should be calculated based on the present value of the cash flows they provide to the plate’s owner, using what is called the discounted incremental cash flow approach.

The fair market value of a taxi plate license is the price that some effective economic agent is willing to pay to own these plates. If an owner cannot generate the revenues from the plates that other individuals in society can, this owner should sell the plate (at its fair market value) to individuals who are more efficient and effective.

All taxi plates that provide the same right to cash flows have the same value, in the same way that all shares of BCE, a telecommunications enterprise, that give the same rights to cash flows (say, dividends) in the exact same circumstances all have the same value.

When assets have different rights and privileges, such as common shares and preferred shares, then their values may be different. It is the same with taxi plates in the case of Ottawa, as there are operationally two categories of plates: Artisan and Industrial (our terminology).

The Artisan plates are plates owned by the driver of the plated taxi or owned by an individual who leases it to one or many drivers. An individual can own at most one Artisan plate.

Industrial plate owners are either individuals who own more than one plate or corporations, who must generate revenues by leasing the plated taxis to one to three drivers. The report presents the methodology that should be used to value the two types of plates (Artisan and Industrial).

Our analysis will conclude that the damages sustained by taxi plate owners because of the City of Ottawa’s negligence should be assessed in the aggregate. In our view, Artisan plates have a different value than Industrial plates, with Industrial plates being worth slightly less than Artisan plates.

Accordingly, plate values should be assessed in the aggregate within each group of plates (both Artisan and Industrial). Accessible plates of each type should be worth less than standard plates of each type.”

Boyer’s co-author on the report is Christian Dorion, who earned his Ph.D. in Finance from McGill University in 2010, after completing a master’s degree in machine learning at Université de Montréal and working for more than three years as a quantitative analyst in a fintech consulting firm. His research, published in leading finance journals, focuses on derivatives, structured products, and the role of systematic risk in
asset pricing.

Dorion teaches investments and derivatives at the undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral levels,
and has supervised more than fifty graduate students. Between 2013 and 2025, he directed the
scientific activities of the Canadian Derivatives Institute, where he led the Institute’s academic
and industry outreach, including its international conference and its network of senior fellows.
In parallel, Dorion has carried out consulting mandates in finance and derivatives since 2019,
working on a handful of expert cases, though without testifying in court. Building on this
experience, he became the founding CEO of Delta Vega Financial in 2022, a firm created to
commercialize a risk-scoring methodology for structured products developed in collaboration
with Canadian market participants