Metro vs Ottawa closing submissions May 6

Aggregate versus individual payment calculations at issue

Closing submissions in the Metro Taxi vs City of Ottawa court case are scheduled to be filed on Wednesday, May 6th.

“This Court has found the City of Ottawa liable in negligence for the class members’ losses. For the plate owner class, the losses at issue are a permanent loss in value of taxi plates. Taxi platesare financial assets that can be valued using tried-and-true methods. Using these methods, theselosses ought to be assessed in the aggregate,” lawyers for the Plaintiffs Conway Baxter Wilson writes in its submission to the court.

“The City’s non-enforcement was not a one-time event: it occurred continuously over asustained period of time: this Court held that the City failed to enforce its taxi by-law from September 1, 2014 to September 30, 2016 (“the breach period”). This sustained breach of the standard of care caused permanent loss to the value of taxi plates.”

Lawyers for the City of Ottawa, however, submit that “Overstatement of damages is a structural feature of the Plaintiffs’ methodology. Their approach to calculating aggregate damages cannot be employed without significantly overstating the City’s liability. For this reason alone, damages must be assessed individually.”

After a decade of legal proceedings, Ontario Superior Court Justice Marc Smith found on May 13, 2024 that the City of Ottawa was “negligent” in not enforcing its own by-laws regarding Uber, which he deemed to be “a bandit Taxi company.” He awarded the plaintiffs $213,000,000 in damages. Plaintiffs including Metro Taxi and the City of Ottawa as the defendant have now spent two years attempting to determine whether the damages should be assessed in the aggregate, as Metro Taxi argues, or individually, as the City of Ottawa wishes.