In 2013 Uber arrived in Quebec and began operating without respecting provincial regulations. Taxi drivers had paid up to $200,000 each for permits that the Quebec government had deliberately limited in number. The scarcity of those permits was government created. The value those permits held was government created. The market that made them worth $200,000 was built on the government’s promise that it controlled who could operate commercial passenger transport in the province. Then the government let Uber operate anyway. The permits lost most of their value. The taxi drivers who had built their financial lives around those permits lost their primary asset. Many of them were immigrant workers. Many from Caribbean and African backgrounds. Who had spent years saving to purchase a permit that the Quebec government had positioned as a stable business asset. In June 2024 the Quebec Superior Court ordered the government to pay $144 million in additional compensation to the affected drivers. The court recognized that the government had deprived permit holders of their property without adequate compensation. This week the Quebec Court of Appeal reversed that decision. Quebec owes nothing more. What the Court Said The Court of Appeal ruled that the situation cannot found a claim for disguised expropriation. The court determined that the government modified the legislative structure and opened the taxi market to competition for reasons of public interest without the state deriving any advantage from the change. Which is the legal framing. The practical translation is this. The government created a market. Sold access to that market at prices it indirectly controlled through permit scarcity. Collected taxes on the economic activity that market produced for decades. Then allowed a foreign technology company to enter that market without following the rules the permit holders had paid to operate under. Watched the permit values collapse. Paid what it calculated was sufficient compensation. Then appealed when a court said the compensation was insufficient. And won. The Court of Appeal concluded that a taxi permit is primarily an administrative authorization created and governed by the state. That economic harm resulting from restrictions on its use cannot serve as the basis for an expropriation claim unless the regulation amounts to a confiscation or elimination of all reasonable use of the property. Which is a legal distinction that means very little to a driver who paid $200,000 for a permit in 2012 and received $50,000 in compensation in 2019. The Numbers Behind the Decision When the permit system was abolished in 2019 Quebec paid $873 million in compensation to permit holders across the province. The Superior Court in 2024 ruled this was insufficient and ordered an additional $144 million. The Court of Appeal just reversed that additional $144 million. The taxi drivers argued that many of them received approximately $150,000 less than the market value of their permits before Uber’s arrival in 2016. Dama Metellus who represented the class action members since 2016 said giving permit holders back what they paid meant that those who bought their permits earlier received less for exactly the same asset. Which had no logic. He was right. It has no logic. The Court of Appeal ruled in favor of the government anyway. Who Actually Lost The taxi permit system in Montreal created a specific economic pathway for immigrant workers. The permit required significant capital investment. It produced stable income. It could be passed to family members. It served as collateral for loans. For a first generation immigrant with limited access to the professional credential pathways that other Quebecers use to build wealth it was one of the few government-sanctioned routes to business ownership and financial stability. Many of the permit holders who launched this class action are from communities that SIIIOCULI has documented throughout this series. Haitian. Caribbean. North African. Workers who built their economic lives around an asset the Quebec government explicitly valued and then devalued without adequate remedy. The $873 million paid in 2019 sounds significant. Divided across thousands of permit holders across the province it represents a fraction of what those permits were worth at peak value. The additional $144 million the Superior Court ordered would not have made them whole. It would have reduced the gap. The Court of Appeal closed even that. The Uber Question Nobody Is Asking Uber entered Quebec in 2013 and operated for years without following provincial regulations. The company lobbied the government aggressively. A Radio-Canada investigation documented Uber’s secret campaign to establish itself in Quebec. The government ultimately legalized Uber’s operations through a pilot project in 2016 and then through legislation in 2019 that abolished the permit system entirely. At no point did Uber compensate the permit holders whose asset values it destroyed by operating outside the rules. The class action lawyers noted that there is a separate action against Uber still pending. What we did not get against the government Uber will pay for according to one of the lawyers involved. Which means the full story is not concluded. But the Quebec government’s liability has now been capped by the Court of Appeal at what it already paid. While the company whose illegal operation created the crisis faces a separate proceeding. The government that failed to enforce its own rules against Uber has been absolved of the financial consequences of that failure by its own court system. The Pattern This platform has documented a consistent Quebec institutional pattern across multiple sectors over recent weeks. The government creates conditions. Those conditions produce harm to specific populations. Compensation is offered at levels below the actual loss. When legal action seeks full compensation the government appeals. The court system finds grounds to limit liability. The taxi drivers who paid $200,000 for government-created permits received partial compensation for a government-created loss and were told by the government’s appeal court that the partial compensation is sufficient. The trucking industry that created its own driver shortage requests public subsidies. The school transport system that sent oversized buses down narrow streets with unprepared drivers blames the driver shortage. The healthcare system that drove away nurses through poor conditions pays premium agency rates and calls it a staffing problem. The common thread is that the people who absorb the cost of institutional decisions are rarely the people who make them. And the legal and administrative systems that are supposed to provide remedy are operated by the same institution whose decisions caused the harm. The Honest Conclusion Thousands of taxi drivers mostly immigrant workers built their financial lives around permits the Quebec government created and valued. Uber arrived. The permits lost their value. The government paid less than the loss and called it adequate. A court said it was not. The government appealed. The Court of Appeal said it was adequate after all. Dama Metellus who represented these drivers for nearly a decade said he always believed such injustice could not remain without consequence. The Court of Appeal just told him it can. SIIIOCULI — Intelligence. Sovereignty. Awareness. siiioculi.lilxbrxaker.com