If you wanted to open a fast food outlet in Vancouver, you would apply for a licence at City hall. There is no requirement that you need to call yourself McDonald’s, A&W, Burger King or Kentucky Fried Chicken.

There is also no requirement that you need to hold shares in these places to get a permit to operate a fast food outlet. So why is it that if you want to own and drive a cab, you need to call yourself Black Top, Vancouver, Maclures or Yellow?

In a city that complains long and loud about the state of its taxi service, no one it seems wants to delve a little bit deeper to find out why a cabal of four companies hold a monopoly on the industry in Vancouver.

These four companies, Yellow, Black Top, Maclure’s and Vancouver Taxi buy cab licences from the government for about $100 each. These licences immediately turn to gold once purchased.

The actual value of a taxi licence by the time the cab hits the road ranges from $300,000 to $600,000.

One cab driver listed the going rates for cab licences in Vancouver as follows

Yellow- $700,000.00

Black Top-$640,000.00

Maclures - $ 540,000.00

Vancouver - $500,000.00.

The companies create a shareholder structure while owning the licences and if you want to buy a share i.e. cab permit, you pay the company hundreds of thousands of dollars. The fellas who buy the shares rarely drive the cabs.

The guys and gals who drive the cabs are lucky if they get home with $100 in their pocket after an eight hour stint.

If the going rate for a cab licence is so lucrative, why isn’t the City of Vancouver and for that matter all municipalities cashing in to reduce our taxes? There is something not right with this picture when you do the math.

Vancouver has just approved 111 new licences for this year. Black Top asked for 30, Vancouver and Maclures want 20 each and Yellow is asking for 41.

If you average out the actual values of the licence to $300,000 each, that’s a whopping $33.3 million. And the city collected a few thousand dollars. Black Top currently has 167 licences, Yellow has 212, MacLure’s has 45 and Vancouver Taxi has 57.

If Vancouver city hall insisted on a portion of the proceeds when these licences or as they call it “shares” are flipped, our coffers will be richer by tens of millions of dollars.

Recently, our minister of taxis Kevin Falcon lead the charge to make cabbies more accountable saying “there is a crisis of confidence developing in the cab industry”.

He is pushing for a passenger bill of rights and is organizing spot checks and undercover fares to keep tabs on errant cabbies.

This was spurred by complaints about service and after Falcon; the Transport Minister himself was left standing on the curb by a cabbie who refused to take his fare.

He also wants more cabs to go green.

While the efforts are laudable, Falcon won’t touch the way the industry is monopolized and how licences are bought or sold.

It is no secret that the Vancouver taxi industry is run by a group of powerful entrepreneurs who are well connected and seed political parties with substantial donations to protect their money making machines. This cabal, with the blessing of the authorities, has barred you and me from going to city hall to get a taxi licence and operate a cab independently.

It does not allow for free entry into the market while reaping millions of dollars by regulating itself.

There is a name for powerful groupings like this.

It’s called the Mafia.