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That broke quite a few “rules” in one fell swoop.

As, er, certain legacy media properties have fallen on hard times, there has been some half-hearted talk of subsidizing the news industry. CBC got $675 million over five years in this year’s budget to support its institutional quest for perfect mediocrity. But mostly, we deal with it. We adapt, or we move on.

Why, I’m often asked, do newspaper journalists tend not to despise Uber? Because we know we’re the taxi drivers in this war. We know our traditional business model makes no sense anymore: the classified advertisement is as dead in 2016 as the taxi stand ought to be. There are incalculably more efficient ways to rent an apartment or match a cabbie to a fare. And we know we did it, partly, to ourselves: we gave away news for free, then asked people to pay for it. Ages after Uber began disrupting the Toronto market, taxi drivers were still routinely and illegally turning down short fares and making faces at credit cards. Both industries made themselves hugely vulnerable.

In the sense that journalists are not overwhelmingly non-white immigrants, they are very much unlike taxi drivers. Toronto’s taxi drivers make for sympathetic victims — at least when they’re not behaving like maniacs at city council meetings. But I suspect they’ll be fine in this new world, now that Toronto — of all the backward change-averse cities — has essentially legalized companies like Uber.

At no point in its efforts to run Uber out of town did Toronto’s taxi industry provide city staff with non-anecdotal evidence of the financial impact it was suffering — an odd omission, considering it is ostensibly crippling. And the new technologies that taxi companies adopted under Uber’s duress should make drivers’ lives much easier. That’s why so many of them already use the app to find fares, and kick Uber a percentage: it can dramatically reduce the downtime between trips.