The City of North Battleford is moving ahead with the next step in its new vehicle for hire bylaw, and that is to move to first reading.
On Monday evening the city’s Planning Committee voted to recommend administration bring forward the new draft bylaw, as presented, for approval at council.
That means the bylaw will now go to the full council for first reading. Three readings of the bylaw would be required for it to pass and take effect.
The new bylaw would replace the existing taxi bylaw currently in effect and include updates that would open up the city to ride-sharing services.
The draft bylaw came up for discussion for the first time at their Nov. 12 meeting, and took up a good portion of the Planning Committee meeting Monday where administration provided further information on some of the more contentious items in the bylaw.
One main item is whether the city should do away with regulating the number of taxi licenses in the city. North Battleford currently grants a maximum of 16 taxi cab licenses, all of which are held by Crown Cab. Administration is not recommending maintaining the monopoly on taxi licenses in the new bylaw, but ultimately that will be a council decision.
At Monday’s meeting, more detailed numbers were provided from 15 similar-sized communities throughout the prairie region, showing the trend in other cities towards deregulation.
Nine western Canadian communities – Weyburn, Humboldt, Beaumont, Strathmore, Okotoks, Airdrie, Cold Lake, Portage la Prairie, and Dauphin – do not regulate numbers of taxi cabs licenses. The other six do: Swift Current, Lloydminster, Melfort, Camrose, Thompson and Winkler.
Of those 15, only Humboldt, Dauphin and Winkler had only one cab company in the city. The other communities had multiple taxi companies licensed to operate and, in the case of Airdrie, they had 15 of them.
City Planner Ryan Mackrell said they got an additional late response from Leduc. Mackrell said they, too, do not regulate tax cab licenses, but recently made changes to their own bylaw and had an interesting take on taxis.
“They treat them like any other business now,” said Mackrell. “They don’t want to meddle in an industry when they don’t need to.”
Leduc’s bylaw, he said, includes provisions where taxi companies must have at least three cars, must be open 24/7, must do background checks and so on. But it doesn’t regulate anything beyond selling the business license. In Leduc, if an out of town business wants to operate a taxi company, the business license costs $150. For local companies it’s $100.
Counting Leduc, 10 of the 16 communities that North Battleford reached out to do not regulate taxi cab licenses. 10 do not regulate the rates taxis charge, and seven have not updated their bylaws to include ride sharing.
North Battleford administration provided some further rationale for not restricting licenses in the new bylaw.
One concern heard from the public, including at the October stakeholder consultation, is the “barrier to entry currently in place in North Battleford,” according to a city memo from Mackrell dated Nov. 16.
“By not dictating the amount of licences, it would allow fair entry into the market for new businesses to establish their service. If the licences are restricted, a lottery system would need to be established and this would create a tense environment as some drivers may lose their licences year to year and be out of a job. Administration does not foresee a large influx of licences in the city, it would just allow for the businesses operate in a fair market. A lottery system would create instability and make entry even harder.”
An alternative the city has proposed is to increase the number of licenses to allow more companies to operate.
No concrete decisions were made at the meeting and there was still not a consensus on whether to do away with the monopoly.
Councillor Len Taylor continued to express reluctance to making changes to the current taxi regulation regime, though he was willing to go along with the provisions on limousines and ride-sharing. He ended up casting his vote against the recommendation to bring the draft bylaw to council.
Others, such as Councillor Greg Lightfoot and Mayor Ryan Bater, were in favour of opening things up to deregulation and ending the monopoly on cab licences.
In particular, Bater said the concept of ridesharing “completely changes the market in this community for transportation, because there are no restrictions for ridesharing.”
Bater also wanted to temper expectations about the new bylaw, saying that even if a new bylaw is passed to allow for ride-sharing, that does not mean it is immediately happening. To this point, there have been no requests by ride-sharing companies to set up in North Battleford.
The initial indication is that further discussion on the entire issue will happen once the vehicle for hire bylaw comes up at city council for first reading.
