Pearson International: Limousine Liberals
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Kate | Wednesday, June 22, 2005 |
Glenda at Just Between Us Girls fills in the gaps re: the taxi drivers who have been protesting at Pearson International in Toronto. CTV;
Frustrations ran high Monday afternoon, as approximately 100 drivers staged their first day of pickets on highways around the airport. Some would-be travellers were so frustrated by the 90-minute delays, they abandoned cars to lug their bags to the terminal on foot.
The drivers are angry about the way the Greater Toronto Airports Authority grants new limousine licences.
The drivers don’t want independent drivers to be excluded from applying for the licences needed to take passengers from Pearson. They say the new licences should be awarded on the basis of driver seniority.
Taxi drivers with a regular Toronto-area licence can take customers to the airport, but risk a $100 fine if they take fares back to the city.
MPP Bob Runciman (in the Ontario Legislature);
This seems to be a very unfortunate trademark of this government, because, as I pointed out in debate in this House last week, this government did exactly the same sort of thing with respect to transportation legislation. The limousine drivers based in Mississauga, under legislation brought in by the Minister of Transportation, are now the only people who have the right to pick up passengers at Pearson airport. If a taxicab driver in the city of Toronto drops someone off, he can no longer pick up anybody at Pearson, but a limousine coming into Toronto can pick up people in Toronto. So why did they do that? Right in the middle of that legislation, the limousine drivers had a fundraiser for the Liberal Party of Ontario and gave them a $200,000 cheque.
Business as usual in Bananada.
About the Author: Kate is a freelance commercial and automotive airbrush artist living in Saskatchewan, Canada. She was one of the original guest bloggers at OTB in November 2004 and soon joined the permanent stable, contributing through January 2007.
Eventually, she turned to writing full time at her own blog, small dead animals, which was voted the Best Canadian Blog in the 2004 Weblog Awards and has been generally considered that country's best blog ever since.
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Yeah, no kidding.
And the deal is the amount of traffic running from PEarson to the city is enormous, and will get the owners in question a pile of change.
Person itself meanwhile is apparently under some pains to deal with the budget cutting going on there. Just read an interesting article (for me, as a radio hobby type).
The authority that runs Pearson, used to run a rather powerful station on 1280am...call was CFYZ, as I recall.... and it around 400 watts. An unusually powerful signal for the type of station. Basicly an info station, run by computer. It was the most powerful AM at an airport I was aware of. They stopped running it, complaining it was too expensive. A 400 watt station run by computer, running static announcements? Too expensive?
Word is they plan to re-start the station, but that seems wishful thinking.
Something smells, here. An awful lot of strange stories coming out of that airport autirty of late.
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