May the 4th be with you: ending epic obliviousness

Blissfully unaware politicians are in charge of Canada, and the rest of your life

Monday, May the 4^th was an epic “We told you so” day for humans who value experience, intelligence, common sense and being able to move faster than 5km/hour. So many of the concerns the Taxi industry tried to point out to politicians a decade ago have come crashing in at the exact same moment, it could amount to a harmonic convergence of schadenfreude.

Alarmingly, the fact that this multitude of easily foreseeable ground transportation realities would collide with predictably wretched results does not bode well for other issues in Canadian governance in the years ahead…but I’ll get to that later.

 On Monday, May the 4^th, Uber drivers organized a protest at Nathan Phillips Square because they do not earn enough money to keep a Vehicle for Hire on the road, and also eat food.  These are issues Taxi operators cared about and negotiated for a century before Uber arrived.

The driver's protesting today are living the reality of legislated poverty – locked into "engaged time" pay with no expense coverage.

Now @fordnation and @DavidPiccini want to expand this broken model to rural communities with the Northlander Pilot. We can't allow workers… pic.twitter.com/S9kDEfuvzc

— Earla Phillips (@earlwithana) May 4, 2026

Also on May 4^th, the Globe and Mail published a significant piece on the fact that the average rideshare driver drives around empty half of the time, and that the number of these vehicles doubled from 17,500 to 35,000 between 2022 and 2025. Because there are so very many drivers chasing the same business, the average driver earns $5.97 per hour. The Globe’s analysis is based upon the City of Toronto’s recently released data set “Private Transportation Companies’ Vehicle Operating Data.”

Over at Toronto City Hall, Toronto’s Accessibility Committee met to discussed topics ranging from Mental Health Week to the celebration of AccessFest in June. Here’s my summary of this Committee considering Toronto’s state of readiness to provide on-demand accessible transportation to global attendees at FIFA this summer:

Peter Athanasopoulos, Spinal Cord Injuries Ontario: “We look forward to hearing about Toronto’s state of readiness to serve visitors with disabilities during FIFA.”

Kristine Hubbard, Operations Manager at Beck Taxi: “In 2015, we had 500 Wheelchair Accessible Vehicles. In 2024, we had 100. In 2026, we have 4.”

Yesterday felt like that scene in an old TV show, when the confused protagonist regains consciousness or awakes from a trance and exclaims, “WHAT HAPPENED? WHERE AM I?”

City staff is lying right now at the accessibility committee meeting. Everything they are saying is untrue:
1. They know how many vehicles are rear-loaders (on-demand)
2. They decided that 15 minutes was the standard for accessible service with taxis (as of 2024 when the fleet

— Kristine Hubbard (@KristineHubbard) May 4, 2026

Back in the pre-Uberian age, the rationale for placing a cap on the number of licensed Taxis and rates were set in any city in the western world included:

1. To keep vehicle numbers and traffic congestion manageable;
2. To allow drivers to earn a liveable wage and keep their vehicles in good repair;
3. To weed out dilletantes and encourage committed professionals to invest in the industry;
4. To keep Taxi fares high enough that they would not cannibalize public transit.

Every piece of this logic, and other elements most notably including passenger safety and consumer protection, were completely discarded in the rush to permit Uber and other app-based services to do business in Canada.

None of this is news to readers in the Taxi industry, and it should not come as any surprise to civilians with even a basic grasp of the concept of “supply and demand.”

But the predictable results of over-supply have come as a complete surprise to the officials, the politicians and bureaucrats who manage our systems (I use the term “manage” lightly.)

So, it appears at least some of the people observing the impact of Uber (the Globe, the Uber drivers) are noticing that maybe something about this calculation is not delivering fair and reasonable results for all concerned. Others (politicians and bureaucrats) are galloping along at a breakneck pace, rushing to rollout a province-wide version of the same labour and safety catastrophe to the entire province that has so successfully been delivered to Toronto.

Now, having witnessed May 4^th, I realize that the most horrifying and frightening aspects of all of this is not just that observers are only now beginning to grasp the reality of even the most basic economic facts of rideshare.

In 2026, the most horrifying and frightening aspect of all of this is the nightmare realization that our politicians are just as blissfully unaware of every other detail of how the world works. And they are in charge of Canada, and the rest of your life.

Here’s a quick sample of the disparities:

Taxi warned in 2016	Current reality in 2026
There must be a limit on the number of Vehicles for Hire	The number of VFH has doubled, and they are driving around empty half of the time
Industry and government must establish a standard metered rate and update regularly	Drivers are averaging $5.97 per hour after expenses

If every level of government could be SO wrong about how having 80,000 Ubers vs 5000 Taxis would impact life, imagine what a catastrophe it’s going to be when everyone finally admits they are also wrong about these ideas:

EVs – Canadians should be forced to buy them	Canadians who have lived through winter do not want to buy EVs, and car dealers are drowning in unsold product. Thousands of manufacturing jobs have been lost.
Supervised injection sites – giving drug users a place to shoot up will save lives	Canada saw about 700 deaths from overdose in 2005, and about 7,000 in 2025.
Legalized marijuana  – will eliminate illegal pot dealing through government-controlled pot shops	Cartels are gaining control of legal pot shops and also using them to distribute other, illegal drugs.
Student loans to boost the economy	Graduates with $60,000+ debt are not marrying or having children who will work in the future economy
Mail-in election ballots, computerized and remote voting to assist people who can’t get to the polls	Ballot-harvesting and “phone-in” systems are ludicrously easy to organize. There is no way for the average volunteer to scrutineer computerized voting systems.
Trading the US market for the Chinese market	Suddenly, the nation that normalized stealing intellectual property, invented the social credit system and ships us industrial loads of fentanyl precursors is the one on which we want to bet our kids’ futures. Not the one just across the river, that invented Constitutional Democracy, fought two wars with us and buys 80 per cent of our exports.
MAiD (Medical Assistance in Dying – government induced death)	Once our society decides it’s just as good to Choose Death as it is to Choose Life, we are finished. The End.