The Superior Court of Quebec on Friday ordered the Quebec government to pay more than 219 million for having “illegally expropriated and without fair compensation” of taxi license owners for the benefit of the giant Uber.
This judgment stems from a class action brought by more than 6,000 former taxi license owners after Quebec concluded a pilot project with the multinational Uber in September 2016, when the latter refused to respect Quebec laws on professional licenses issued to drivers.
Nearly 144 million are therefore claimed as expropriation compensation, to which are added interest and additional compensation calculated from September 2016 ($27,000 per day), bringing the total to more than 219 million.
“This is a historic victory for taxi license owners who experienced injustice and who fought for years and finally won their case,” explains Me Mathieu Charest-Beaudry who represented the members of the collective action.
For the Court, the authorization of such a pilot project with Uber was the first step in the expropriation process which resulted in the complete abolition of the taxi permit system in October 2019 for the benefit of the multinational.
In her judgment, Judge Silvana Conte concluded that taxi licenses represented an important financial asset for holders who have often worked all their lives, an asset that the government swept aside by abolishing the permit system.
By ending the market for taxi owner permits, Quebec also put an end to the status of these permits which were until then considered capital goods that could be assigned, transferred and sold.
Unfair compensation
The government then established several compensation programs intended for taxi license owners.
The first took place after the adoption of the pilot project with Uber. The government then allocated an envelope of 250 million to compensate for the loss of value of the permits after the arrival of the multinational.
A second compensation program then saw the light of day in 2019 after the adoption of the law abolishing taxi licenses. This program was based on the acquisition price of permits.
For mee Charest-Beaudry this way of compensating license owners is a “blatant injustice” which places an undue burden on the most vulnerable, in particular the elderly, sometimes in their eighties, who purchased their license in the 1970s.
“Those who paid $10,000 in the 1970s for their license, they were not fairly compensated by the government, while someone who bought it in 2013 will have received $200,000,” says -he. [Les gens qui ont témoigné] almost all said that it had an impact on their retirement, because they had prepared to live on the income from this license when they retired, but they lost this asset. »
Taxpayer dollars
The compensation already awarded to the former drivers, added to the amount of the latest judgment, would represent more than a billion in public money.
“The government made the political choice not to fully compensate these people and the reality is that this choice cost Quebec citizens tens of millions of dollars,” adds Ms.e Charest-Beaudry.
The collective action originally requested 310 million, which corresponds to the value of taxi permits when Uber arrived in 2014. However, the judgment chose to stop at 2016 to measure the amount claimed and to ask Quebec for 144 million.
A class action is still underway against Uber for the loss of revenue caused. Me Charest-Beaudry hopes to be able to claim the difference of 25 million from the multinational.