Here’s the scene. It’s the year 2000. Imagine being Sears a company founded in 1886, a company that led the retail industry for over a century, an icon that was copied, yet never matched. Then an upstart comes along with a technology platform that will change retail forever, as Amazon has done. Well imagine if the government had intervened to stop Amazon and protect Sears, imagine that Sears’ employees threw eggs at Amazon offices, imagine if the government laid out a technology plan to have Sears get up to par with Amazon, but the technology would only be ready in a few years.
While Amazon has had many issues with the government, and numerous court dates dealing with taxes and book publishing licensing issues, it has thrived and completely altered the retail landscape. Amazon disrupted retail like Sears did 100 years earlier.
Uber is Killing it
Now enter 2015, where Uber a popular ride-sharing service that is revolutionizing (killing?) the taxi industry as we know it, and we have the government stepping in to curtail its use. We have the government trying to stop innovation from happening. We have the government not adapting quickly enough to a changing technology and preference landscape. And we have taxi associations crying foul and hiding behind government support, spending more time fighting with paperwork as the weapon, rather than innovation.
In particular, Montreal, Toronto, and Ottawa, have had several anti-Uber demonstrations, for the most part backed by the government. The main arguments are as follows: taxi drivers pay exorbitant taxi license fees (Montreal’s is over $200k); Uber drivers are neither licensed, nor insured; Uber is not paying taxes; and Uber drivers are not declaring taxes, even though many of them earn less than the $30k per year required to need a tax number.
