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The ride-hailing application Uber appears to have taken a huge chunk out of the investment of thousands of taxi drivers in the province, new figures released to the Montreal Gazette show.

The average sale of taxi permits, calculated by the Commission des Transports du Québec, dipped in value by tens of thousands of dollars in the span of a year, the largest decrease on record since 1999.

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First issued by the Quebec government decades ago as a way to control the supply of cabs, taxi permits have been sold on the secondary market, often on sites like Kijiji.

Between 1999 and 2016, permits more than tripled in value, and in the case of Laval, the most lucrative market, they quintupled in value. However, in the last year, all five of districts of the Montreal region saw a dip of between 9.5 and 18.9 per cent during the second full year of Uber’s operations in the region as a competitor to taxis.

Here is how much taxi permits sold for in the five districts in Montreal as of March 31:

•Laval: $242,681 down 9.5 per cent

•West Island: $190,042, down 12.8 per cent

•Montreal: $143,654, down 18.9 per cent

•Montreal East: $143,063, down 16.3 per cent

•Longueuil: $126,591, down 10.7 per cent