Toronto deserves three stars (out of a possible four) for its convincing performance of outrage during Wednesday’s traffic-halting taxi demonstration. We’re classically trained to scoff at public protest, to say its practitioners are driving us away instead of winning us over. But I have to hold back on that last star. While our acting is world-class, the storyline — the one that suggests the public has more claim to outrage than taxi drivers — just isn’t believable.

We naively perceive demonstrations like the taxi protest as a sales pitch, a 30-second window to mobilize the public with sharp arguments and little inconvenience. Protests almost always have the opposite goal: to disrupt daily life, to give a voice to people we regularly fail to sympathize with. A good protest is not a window of opportunity to make change, but a mirror reflecting our values and the consequences of our actions.

Yes, the cab drivers will lose more business because they broke Toronto’s 11th commandment, “Thou shalt not obstruct the roadway.” Yes, more people will likely withdraw their business in favour of UberX, a popular division of the rogue transportation service that licensed cabbies say is ruining them. Cabbies know that better than we do.

They also know that even in a city brimming with cash, residents value a cheap chauffeur over sustainable employment. Instead of accepting Darwin’s theory of economics, or trying to find an alternative within it, cabbies suggest the system is broken, and that we are wrong for supporting it. Do we really expect them to entertain us with a song about their situation, which we are complicit in maintaining?

Even people who prefer UberX or other transportation services to city-licensed taxis cannot ignore the way taxi drivers in Toronto are being abused. Licensed taxis are highly regulated: they must collect HST, own commercial insurance, and undergo regular vehicle inspections. If drivers don’t follow the bylaws, the city can simply take away their licenses and livelihood. UberX dodged these rules for a full year in Toronto, and city officials say Uber is in violation of a new bylaw council adopted in September.

Javaid Wali, an organizer of Wednesday’s protest, spoke to me by phone as he stood with drivers at city hall. He told me that drivers “sincerely apologize to the public for the inconvenience, but this has been forced on us.” Wali disagreed that the conflict is about smarter competition and superior technology. “It’s impossible to compete with an illegal company,” he said plainly.

Mayor John Tory said in October that Uber has been giving the “one-finger salute” to the city’s safety and insurance rules. Yet the San Francisco-based corporate powerhouse seems to face no consequences for its intransigence. But taxi drivers, Wali noted, cannot even stage a protest at city hall, as three drivers on hunger strike did last week, without being confronted by police, who say they are violating city bylaws by pitching a tent and sleeping in Nathan Phillips Square.

“Now the word around the industry is that there are two laws: one for poor and immigrants, and another for billionaire foreign investors,” Wali told me. The thousands of drivers who came from as far as Hamilton yesterday to demonstrate believe they are following the rules, and being punished for it. It would be irresponsible for them to deliver this news with anything other than the jarring urgency, anger, and frustration they feel.

“I have seen drivers in tears because they cannot provide food and shelter for their families,” Wali said. I’m sure many of us have felt like crying while trying to get a cab in the city. The market has accommodated our concerns, at the expense of a decent livelihood for people who serve us. The average Toronto UberX driver made $3,125 during the service’s first year of operation. Lower wages for drivers and fewer safety regulations for passengers seem to be the future of the industry.

Drivers have drained their savings and mortgaged their homes to buy taxi plates that are becoming worthless. Many work 12-hour shifts for poverty pay. Naturally, they're fed up. When hardworking people are cheated out of opportunity in Canada, they ought to disrupt the public.

Dignity and basic needs always trump public sympathy and convenience, and no social movement is won by catering to popular opinion. In fact injustice is often so popular, and so resistant to logic and evidence, that stopping traffic is the only way to show people that something around them has gone horribly wrong.

Desmond Cole is a Toronto-based journalist. His column appears every Thursday.

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