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Renting a parking spot — year-round, if you wanted — would be just as easy, though cities would have some things to say about the potential for residential properties’ being turned into commercial parking lots by stealth. That’s already a problem in some neighbourhoods even though it’s against the law; we’d probably want some restrictions to keep landowners from paving their yards to squeeze in more cars for a few extra bucks.

The truth is, the hard part isn’t devising sensible regulations. It’s disentangling the government from existing moneyed interests. It takes guts to screw over entrenched industries that have benefitted from market-limiting regulatory regimes.

Since he’s now a minor figure in an opposition party, Hudak doesn’t have to worry all that much about practicalities like the thousands of angry cabbies who’d all but lose their investments in taxi plates across Ontario. That’s a problem. We can either buy our way out of it or blow it away, but it pretty much has to be one or the other.

A right-wing government might take on unionized cabbies aggrieved by Uber and a left-wing one might take on the hoteliers aggrieved by Airbnb, but finding one government willing to have both fights wouldn’t be easy. The fact many of these businesses are mostly regulated by municipalities complicates things even more: They’ll all come up with different ways of adapting and it’ll be a mess.

The legislature can stop it.

If Hudak had had ideas like these a couple of years ago, he might have been premier. Now, he’s hoping his bill passes a second reading on Thursday and gets sent for committee hearings. That would be a good and useful thing.

dreevely@ottawacitizen.com

twitter.com/davidreevely