No budget funds for Taxi plate owners
Toronto approved, managed plate sales for decades
by Rita Smith with files from Alexander Zdravko
There are no funds set aside in the 2025 Budget to compensate elderly career Taxi operators whose plates were made worthless by Toronto, officials stated at the January 13 Budget Briefing.
Asked whether the budget contemplated compensation for Taxi drivers who had been promised since the 1970s that the plate would be their pension plan, Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer Stephen Conforti replied “The short answer is that there is no funding in this budget being considered for that.”
“It’s the only thing we’re hoping for, really,” Co-op Cabs CEO Abdul Mohamoud told Taxi News in December. “These guys are in their 70s, some older. They cannot keep working….Toronto has been telling them since the 1970s and the 1980s ‘invest in a plate, the plate will be your pension.’
“Now, they have nothing. They cannot drive until they die…Toronto could afford to help them retire with a little bit of dignity.”
Of particular interest to industry members is what is going to happen with the millions of dollars Toronto has collected in per-trip fees from rideshare companies including Uber; those fees amounted to more than $15 million in 2023 alone and could be used to compensate elderly drivers, Mohamoud points out.
In the past, Toronto encouraged Taxi drivers to purchase plates and “operate their own business,” as Taxi School training materials described. Upon retirement, drivers believed, they would be able to sell their plates or lease them out to generate a monthly income in their retirement. Banks recognized the plates as security and offered loans for purchase; some drivers mortgaged their family homes to buy one. The plates were devalued almost completely when Toronto legalized rideshare in 2016.
