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Little more than a year after Uber launched in Edmonton, the City of Champions last week became the first in Canada to bring the taxi alternative into its regulatory fold. There will be criminal background checks, mandatory commercial insurance and vehicle inspections. But there will also be unlimited supply, and demand-based pricing.

It wasn’t painless. Cabbies were furious. “For drivers that own plates, it’s understood that the value of the plates may go down, and that weighs on us,” Edmonton Mayor Don Iveson conceded in an interview.

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Cabbies who rent their rides, however, “have another option for who to drive for,” he said. “Many of them we heard from in this process are happy … to be able to jump back and forth between the two.”

To put it mildly, Toronto’s experience has been dissimilar. And slower.

Uber launched in Toronto three-and-a-half years ago, and the taxi industry and its supporters have been howling ever since. In December, taxi-ists occupied the intersection of Queen and Bay streets for hours. Paul Sekhon, a manager at City Taxi, proposed they “make the mayor’s a—–e bleed until he can’t walk.”