There's not much to like about the company, but you can't deny the useful panic it inspired in the taxi industry

The “Uber Files” are the latest massive dump of leaked documents to land in a newspaper’s electronic mailroom, but this dump is sliding off the front pages much quicker than the Panama Papers and Wikileaks dumps before it. Leaked by supposedly repentant former Uber executive Mark MacGann, these roughly 124,000 internal communications from the heady early days of Uber’s total war on legacy taxi markets lay bare an amoral gang of tech-heads willing to bend any law, tell any fib and hire every filthy lobbyist in every capital in its short-term mission to replace traditional taxi drivers with gig workers, and in its long-term mission to replace taxis with driverless cars.

Surely by now we all understood that’s exactly what Uber is, and decided whether to take it or leave it.

It’s still an interesting read on any level, though. And for this country especially, it poses some serious questions about legacy corporations and industries, their regulators, and the customer experience.

Presumably, people will have different reactions to the Uber Files depending on the pay-someone-to-take-you-somewhere market where they live. As a Torontonian, I found myself chuckling at the notion I ought to be particularly offended by any of this. In Toronto, Uber essentially beat the taxi industry, which had spent decades building wildly outsized influence at City Hall (on the right as much as on the left), at its own game. It was the plate owners and taxi companies that benefited, the rank-and-file drivers and consumers who suffered.

Before Uber galumphed into town, the debit machines in taxi cabs were unreliable well past the point of believability (though in my experience, Ottawa and Montreal taxis were worse on that front). At busy times, the line for taxis at Pearson Airport stretched into oblivion (though things seemed much worse in Vancouver).

Toronto taxi drivers’ routine and illegal refusal to accept short fares, always a giant pain in the rear end for people who live close to downtown, eventually cost a young woman her life in in 2015, when a group of friends was repeatedly denied a ride home and wandered into the crossfire of a gangland shooting. Last I tried to get in a taxi outside Union Station, they were still at it.

If you want a very tense encounter, you can just refuse to leave the vehicle and demand to be taken where you want to go or else you’ll call the police. If you just want to get home, thank goodness there’s Uber.

Long ride or short ride, Black and Indigenous Torontonians reported taxis routinely refusing them rides. Some taxi drivers felt they could decide to transport or not transport service dogs according to their personal opinions about canines. That’s a heck of a lot more difficult with Uber, which (like it or not) can “fire” one of its “independent contractors” with the push of a button.

Indeed, even people who loathe Uber should appreciate its disruptive influence. One of the first productive things the taxi companies in Toronto did when they realized they were losing purchase at City Hall was to introduce or vastly improve their own smartphone apps, offering most or all of the convenience of the Uber experience but also the peace of mind some people take in a proper taxi.

There is no reason to believe that ever would have happened without Uber. Why would they have bothered?

I wonder if there might be other lasting benefits as well. When Uber first landed here, Toronto Star establishment types were apoplectic at the notion of charging more for rides when there’s a lot of demand than when there isn’t. You would think people preferred not to get a cab at all than to submit to what Uber dubbed “surge pricing.”

Nowadays, surge pricing doesn’t seem to be controversial at all. Might this unusual exposure to raw market economics open minds to further bold experiments? What if we priced roads, highways, public transit and other public commodities the same way?

Uber proudly flouted the rule of law, and you certainly don’t have to like it. Flouting the law shouldn’t have been necessary to drag the taxi experience out of the gutter. But it was. And other industries are waiting to be dragged out of the gutter as well.

Our heavily protected airline industry treats us like garbage. The “Air Passenger Protection Regulations” the Liberal government came up with in 2019 to address the problem actually made things worse: As I reported in 2020, the Canadian Transportation Agency used those new regulations to overturn previous precedent and allow Air Canada and WestJet to keep their customers’ money for flights they never flew.

Our heavily protected telecommunications industry also treats us like garbage, with leading player Rogers on Friday having suffered its second catastrophic network failure in just 14 months. Regulators and politicians should be screaming bloody murder; instead they’re working soberly to find a solution. Like partners. Count on the solution not being one.

We pay miles over the odds for dairy products to keep a small cartel of farmers fat, rich and happy, and maybe three politicians in Ottawa are willing to speak against it.

It’s not clear how an Uber-type company might disrupt those or other consumer-unfriendly industries. But then, it wasn’t clear how Uber might disrupt the taxi industry until it came along and did it. If Canadian governments and regulators want to be seen as something more than enemies to be conquered along the road to progress, they might finally want to pull their socks up.

• Email: cselley@nationalpost.com | Twitter: cselley

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