The owners got to get these cars moving. They got to get people in them. If it comes down to hiring mental patients, they don’t care. There’s even talk that they used to go down to the penitentiary and wait for drivers to get out from doing weekends and put them to work. You can’t get a good man at it no more, a good respectable man, because there’s not enough money to be made for a good respectable man to go out there. What good respectable man is going to go out and put in eleven hours to come home with fifty bucks? What happens is you get the shady people driving taxis: welfare recipients, drug dealers, people who never worked a day in their goddamn life. There are a lot of investors in at it now, too, guys who own other businesses. We call them “fleeters.” They don’t drive the taxis. They just sit home while another bunch is out paying for the gas to keep them on the road. The cars are complete junk. They don’t care what happens to nothing.
The government doesn’t know they’re out taxiing. The drivers don’t say they’re working, and it’s all cash money. I guess unemployment doesn’t give a damn, and the same goes for welfare. I phoned down, and they said, “Buddy, there’s nothing we can do about that. We don’t have the manpower. You’re only wasting your time calling us.”
Let’s face it. We’re in St. John’s, man. What’s out there? There’s nothing here—nothing. There’s lots of welfare. They say that for every dollar we give Ottawa, Ottawa gives us four back, and that’s in welfare and unemployment checks. When you’re out driving a taxi, on the fifteenth of the month and the thirtieth of the month the city comes alive. Your phone rings off the hook because the welfare people are out getting their groceries.
The tourists who come down from Toronto say, “I heard so much about your city.” The next thing, they get in the back of a cab and they’re doing 130 kilometres. Buddy is probably after smoking three joints, he’s on welfare, and he’s probably after drinking a flask before he even came to work. It’s going on. It’s going on because that’s the only people they can get to drive the taxis. If there was money out there to be made and the city could properly regulate the taxi business, the nice sensible man might want to hand his business on down to his son. Then you might not have these nutbars flying around. But that’s all that’s out there—retards.
There are saner people incarcerated in the Waterford Hospital. I’m telling you there are saner people in the Waterford Hospital. I can take you to three drivers, right now. They work every night. They’re like robots, mechanically inclined robots. They work every night of the week. And they’re gone. [Points to his temple; his hand is shaped like a pistol.] It reflects back on the city. This is the city’s image. I’ve heard instances where people will pass the Basilica, and they ask, “What year was that built?”
Buddy will say, “How the fuck do I know when it was built?”
The city is hurting.
No one can do anything about it. What can they do? The city, these fools who sit around the table on Channel 9, they don’t know what to do. This Hour Has 22 Minutes is better than those fools. They don’t know what to do. They make one wrong move and these stand owners will sue their asses. The big boys are too powerful, and they’re afraid of them.
They could buy back some licences, or something. There’s 364 taxi licences out there. This city is only big enough for 250, maybe. If the owners could get another ten licences off City Hall tomorrow they’d have them. They don’t care about the driver. The driver is dirt. “You piece of dirt, get out there and make fifty bucks. You bring me back fifty bucks, or you won’t get a car for the weekend.”
No one knows how to fight the big stand owners. They’re too powerful. They’re multi-millionaires.
The Last Time We Got a Raise
Paul, driving and dispatching for seventeen years
In the highly competitive taxi industry, cab drivers rarely show unity. But disunity isn’t an insurmountable obstacle. When the 15 per cent harmonized sales tax went into effect on April 1, 1997, the city dragged its feet in adjusting the Taxi Bylaw. For weeks, taxi meters read 7 per cent, while drivers covered the additional 8 per cent. One driver echoed the frustrations over how City Council had handled the increase: “The whole bloody bunch has taken leave of their senses.” When their anger finally spilled over, it led to a massive mid-day protest. In what The Evening Telegram described as “an unusual show of solidarity,” over 100 cabs from several companies blocked off the west-bound lanes of New Gower Street directly in front of City Hall. An emergency meeting was immediately held between industry representatives and the mayor. A day later, taxi fares were increased to offset the tax increase.
Every union in this city, including City Hall who got the say of what happens with taxis, always got three and four-year contracts. Raises were 4, 8 and 12 per cent. If a union in St. John’s wants a raise and doesn’t get it, what do they do? They go out on strike. The last time the taxi industry got a raise was four years ago. The time before that was ten or fifteen years ago when all the taxis cried foul. Nobody listened, and we parked 100 cars in front of City Hall. I was one of them.
A Peaceful Demonstration
Mark, driving for twenty-one years
Supposedly, the big stand in town got a permit to go up Adelaide, right across from George Street, whereas the rest of us taxicab companies got to go around the corner and park and wait for a run. That one stand is only supposed to have four cars on Adelaide at any one time. The other taxis have to park around the corner.
I don’t know the rights of it, but why is one taxi company allowed an unfair advantage over the others? On Regatta day, you got a lot of people who want to take a taxi home, people who are tired, people who are old, and people with kids. Why is it that our stand can’t have access to King’s Bridge Cabs? The city won’t allow it— that’s why. They got it blocked off. Over the years, when I worked the Regatta, I used to go down King’s Bridge Road, turn left onto Empire Avenue and wait on the corner. We all used to do it. They cut us out from going down there because they brought the buses in. That’s City Hall interfering with the buses again, putting them in so they can make money. It’s the same thing with the cruise ships. The city will haul all the buses down and load them up, and we’re left with the scraps.
We organized a committee in order to stop the way things were run, and the superintendent of the police department came down to speak with us. He said, “We’ll let you have a peaceful demonstration to get your point across.” He had us head east on Water, turn left onto Adelaide, and then loop around. There had to be close to 200 cars that came down, and there’s only 364 in this city. That’ll tell you the kind of support we got.
We wanted to try to get different things changed to make it fair for everybody. But they had their minds made up before we went down. One evening, they started off with their usual bullshit, and a guy I know—he’s very quiet, like a mouse—opened his mouth. Out of all the meetings, he finally had enough and told the Director of City Engineering right where to go. He said, “You’re nothing but a liar!”
Fighting Over Scraps
Charlie, driving for thirty-seven years
Among taxicab drivers, the most commonly expressed misconceptions about the taxicab industry are that the licence holders (stand owners, brokers and owner operators) own their taxicab licences and that there are too many taxicabs operating in St. John’s. These are beliefs born out of the frustration of not being able to affect positive change. Historians call this “revisionism.” In the case of the St. John’s taxicab industry it is a reordering of the past which serves the function of explaining oppression and exploitation.
In reality, unlike New York, where taxicab drivers purchase “medallions” at exorbitant prices, in St. John’s, the city leases licences. Researchers working on behalf of the Commission of Inquiry into the St. John’s Taxicab Industry combed the mountain of documentation in the city’s archives. Beginning in 1989, all cabs were required to be attached to a stand. During the inquiry, some stand owners stated that prior to
the change in regulation they held the operator licence. But because of this arbitrary decision by council, the licences were given to the drivers. However, the commission determined that “before 1989, applications for a stand licence were taken by the stand owners to mean taxicab operator licences. But the bylaw was quite clear. The stand did not acquire these. The cab owners did.” Commission researchers also examined the number of taxicabs operating in other similarly sized cities as St. John’s: Halifax, Dartmouth, Saint John, Kitchener-Waterloo and Hamilton. They determined that St. John’s had a comparable number of taxis offering an adequate level of service. In fact, St. John’s consistently ranks below the national average of taxis per-capita. But the belief that the stand owners hold the licences, and that these licences are too numerous, persists.
Somebody needs to do a survey across Canada to find out how many taxis should be on the streets in a city like ours. We probably got twice the national average. Anytime somebody retires and got a licence, retire the licence. We got 364 taxis in St. John’s. In 1980- something, we had 364 taxis in St. John’s. And there was no business then, either. But now we got 364 taxis with about 2,000 drivers. But back then you had 364 taxis and 1,000 drivers. The only thing that’s going to correct this industry is to pick a number that sits well with how much population there is. If you got 500,000 people, pick a number. Right now, the number of taxi licences that are given out each year are based on arbitrary numbers. The numbers are random, at best.
There’s a whole story behind that. It was the late ‘80s, or the early ‘90s. I don’t remember the exact time. All the individual taxi companies owned the licences. For instance, Dave Gulliver, who owned Gulliver’s Taxi, he probably had forty or fifty licences. A lot of people in the taxi industry didn’t like the owners having all the licences. They spoke up and said, “We think the individual drivers should own the licences.”
There was a lot of spitting and shitting and, within a couple of years, City Hall said, “Fuck it!” They revoked all the licences, or something to that effect. If you’re driving the car for a year and you owned that car, you now owned the licence that’s on the side of your sticker. For instance, if a company like Gulliver’s had fifty cars—I don’t know if that’s accurate or not, but it was up there— those licences were divided down the middle somehow. There were 364 taxis in St. John’s, and 170 thereabouts were still owned by the stands. The other 170 were owned by the drivers.
When these guys retire, most times, one of the large companies will buy the licence and put a car on. Two years before most guys pack it up, they’ve got a buyer. It shouldn’t be. Those licences should be retired because there are too many taxis in St. John’s. That’s why nobody can make a living at it.
Saturday and Sunday afternoon there won’t be much business. If it’s like this week, there won’t be nothing doing, I mean nothing— this is as bad as it gets. We got the May 24th weekend coming up. I like to go fishing. I can’t. I got to work on Saturday. Guess who else will be working on Saturday? The rest of the brokers who made fuck all during the week. They’re compounding the problem. Instead of ten cars working on Saturday you got twenty. They got to work. Do you see what I’m saying?
Go to PEI, Charlottetown, for instance, which, I guess, is the largest city in PEI, and ask them how much they’re making taxiing. Those guys are over there making a damn good living. How do I know that? I drove them in my car when they came to the airport in St. John’s. They were going on vacation like everybody else. When I asked them what they were making, I was flabbergasted. It was something like four times what we’re making.
For the first time in eons, our population is starting to creep up just a little tiny bit. Over the last thirty years, it was constantly going down, but the number of taxis stayed the same. It’s constantly going down because people are moving away. The rest are staying and can’t get a job at anything else. Guess what they’re going at? Driving a taxi. Taxis are full with drivers, but they’re not full with passengers.
During the early part of the last century, cab men operated an automobile in the summer and a horse and side-sled in the winter. They most often went to the harbour or railway station on the east end of Water Street looking for a “hobble” or casual work.
With the outset of WWII, some companies, like Burgess Brothers’ Cabs, took the opportunity to expand their business by building a garage to service their taxicabs, common practice amongst taxi fleets in larger North American cities.
Parked in his son’s garage is Roy Burgess’ first car, a ’38 Nash. A taxicab sign is still attached to the roof, the original fare meter still in the glove box. “She’s the only antique taxicab in this city,” he said.
The city was playing catch-up to a swiftly urbanizing society when it passed the“Taxi Bylaw,” in November 1950, adapting existing regulations to meet technological advancements and an increased demand for service. The bylaw made annual taxi driver licences manditory and set minimum employment standards for drivers.
During WWII, with the influx of thousand of Allied troops, taxi stands began to pop up seemingly overnight. Some, like Snow’s Taxi on Pearce Avenue and Star Taxi, were operated from dispatch offices in backyard sheds.
In 1946, Frank O’Keefe opened O.K. Taxi on George Street. Many men who had experience taxiing prior to the war returned to the one job where they knew they could make a dollar: taxiing.
Many taxicab operators had what was referred to in the 1950 “Taxi Bylaw” as a “taxi man’s shelter,” a place where they could “escape the elements.”
Pressured by high insurance premiums and other exorbitant start-up costs, few taxicab drivers buy new cars and many are stretched beyond 300,000 kilometres. Regular maintenance is sometimes curtailed because of slim profit margins.
In the highly competitive taxi industry, taxicab drivers rarely show unity. But disunity isn't an insurmountable obstacle. In the summer of 2005, fifty taxicab drivers parked their cars to protest what the drivers thought was an “unfair” increase in stand rent.
During the George Street Festival, a six-day event in late July, an estimated 120,000 people pass through the gates. By three o’clock in the morning, the bars have emptied and the patrons spill out in search of taxicabs.
The City’s Teeming Entrails
Scenes from the Underground
“No driver shall knowingly drive persons known to him to be engaged in an unlawful act.”
– St. John’s Municipal Act, 1921
“I don’t feel safe downtown. Time was, people would stand on the wharves and come up and say, ‘How are you, boy?’ and be after inviting you home and all this. Proper thing! But my dear: it’s some different these past ten or twelve years. I’d not go near the place now! All those bars, and no shops, and all these people wandering round on drugs, or something. And no one saying hello. I’m scared to go there now.”
– Bridie O’Brien, at the Brady House Detoxification Centre,
as recounted in Neigel Rapport, Talking Violence: An Anthropological Interpretation of Conversation in the City
“Well, it’s like the name says, downtown.”
– Anonymous Royal Newfoundland Constabulary officer,
from Peter McGahan, Police Images of a City
For some taxicab drivers, offshore oil has become the symbol of all that is wrong in our urban culture: the drugs, the violent crime and the prostitution. Black gold is ruining Newfoundland’s traditional way of life. In fact, this logic has become so popular that it is largely accepted by the public and reinforced by the media, the police and social action groups. The line of reasoning goes something like this: crime follows money. Even as early as 1984, in a report prepared by the RCMP, “Impact of Offshore Oil,” the author predicted that “increased affluence will create problems.”
But is crime really on the rise? Because taxicab drivers who work the night shift reiterate seemingly endless stories of drug addicts and prostitutes, one might begin to think that, in fact, a drug-fuelled crim
e wave was sweeping through St. John’s and quickly spreading out beyond the overpass. It’s essential not to take these taxicab stories out of context. Taxicab drivers are regularly exposed to a side of life most people don’t know exists and will probably never see. In fact, taxicab drivers are often active links and ready guides between their clients and the underground economy, earning extra cash by connecting customers with prostitutes, drugs and bootleg liquor. They first gained access to these outside earnings when nightclubs, hotels and massage parlours began to spring up in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Statistics Canada has reported that barely 1 per cent of Canadians have used hard drugs like cocaine. In fact, the number has dropped since 2004 from 1.9 per cent to 1.2 per cent. But, in an article entitled “Fighting a Growing Problem,” The Telegram said, “Drug use in St. John’s has gotten so widespread that buying them on the street is almost as easy as buying a cup of coffee.” Then-RNC Chief Joe Brown went on to state, “Every neighbourhood has someone selling drugs.”
The Other Side of Midnight Page 9