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For Tony Hajjar, Wednesday’s city council decision to legalize Uber in Ottawa is just about the end of the world.

He’s a career taxi driver, one of the fairly small number of them who owns his own plate. Unlike most drivers, he doesn’t have to rent one of the 1,188 city-issued plates that give a person the right to drive a taxi. He’s been driving for 36 years and sank $160,000 into that plate 20 years ago so he could be his own boss.

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“I was just ready to sell it so I can retire,” he says. “Now it’s worthless. It has no value to it at all.”

Cabbies saw the future coming when Uber, disobeying the city’s restrictions, showed up in 2014 and started hooking riders up with freelance drivers at much lower prices than the city requires cabbies to charge. “A lot of people, right now, when they (saw) this happening, they all put their plates on the market. Nobody would buy it for 10 cents,” he says.

According to figures from the city, that isn’t exactly right: somebody this year bought a plate for $140,000, and last year a handful of plates changed hands for amounts running from $23,000 to $27,000. But a lot fewer were traded than once were, and the wild range of prices suggests that a taxi plate is now understood to be a very speculative investment in a market where most people are working with almost no good information.