by Ian Elliot
Northern News Services

NNSL (Dec 03/97) - An activist who has been fighting Hay River's taxi bylaws for years thinks Yellowknife's new logbook requirement is a terrible idea.

Harvey Werner says Yellowknife city council has no authority to make drivers keep logs on every passenger they carry and where the person was picked up and dropped off. Not only won't such logbooks work, he says, but they are an unwarranted burden on drivers and an intrusion of passengers' privacy.

"It's a terrible thing, and they can't give a single good reason for doing it," Werner said during a visit to Yellowknife last week.

"I talked to five or six drivers and I asked them what council was thinking when they drew up this thing up and they said they didn't know."

Werner, who has been fighting a bylaw in Hay River that he feels favors a competing cab company over his own, hopes to start up a territory-wide taxi advocacy group similar to his Citizens Fight Back fund in the South Slave community to fight such battles in the courts.

He said he would be visiting other NWT communities with his message.

"Cab drivers don't want to spend their time fighting city hall every time they come up with a stupid bylaw," he said.

"With the system we have, there are too many aspects where the company itself knows how to protect drivers and passengers, and city council sits up there and it has no idea how to run a cab company."

Taxi companies already keep records of where passengers are picked up and dropped off, he said, and computerized meters show how far the car travelled on a shift.

"The computerized systems they have these days are the best way of keeping track of the cabs," he said.

City council unanimously agreed last month to send the bylaw back to committee for review after receiving objections to the new requirements by the owner of a Yellowknife taxi firm.

Concerns about the new rules, which could constitute invasions of privacy, were also expressed by former alderman John Dalton, who runs a taxi firm himself.