The government of Ontario is about to introduce a pilot project that consolidates its efforts to give U.S. tech giant Uber access to Ontario workers at rates below the province’s hourly minimum wage—cementing the company’s position as the dominant player in Ontario’s growing gig economy.
It does so by using the resurrection of the Northlander Passenger Train as a vehicle to launch the Northlander Rideshare Pilot, which introduces gig work to the transportation sector alongside the Northlander train line, from Toronto to Cochrane. In consultations, Provincial staff invoked the example of Innisfil, where municipally-subsidized Uber rides have until recently replaced dedicated public transit, raising a concern that the Province could expand ride-hail subsidies along the train corridor rather than investing in public transit.
This pilot may become the model for standardized rideshare regulations across the entire province by 2027 announced in the Province’s 2025 Fall Economic Statement.
The Northlander Rideshare Pilot relates closely to previous legislative changes made by the government, most notably the Digital Platform Workers’ Rights Act (DPWRA), passed in 2022 and in effect since July 2005. The DPWRA allows digital platforms, mostly U.S. corporate giants like Uber, to circumvent Ontario’s minimum hourly wage by paying workers only the minimum wage for so-called “engaged time,” meaning only for the time workers spend performing a service.
For rideshare drivers, the time waiting for a ride request remains uncompensated, and companies conveniently transfer risks and operating costs to the worker. Research by University of Toronto scholars analyzing 84 million Uber trips in Toronto over one year found that about 58 per cent of drivers’ gross earnings (before expenses) fall below the minimum wage and that, after paying for expenses, drivers’ median hourly earnings in 2024 were reduced to just $5.97. The DPWRA, in short, represents a backhanded rollback of Ontario’s statutory hourly minimum wage for a growing number of workers in this province who rely on digital platforms to earn a living, and a very profitable law for digital platforms, especially Uber.
Race to the bottom
Northlander Rideshare Pilot officially aims to provide rural residents with transportation options to and from the stops of the Northlander Passenger Train, and to replace a plethora of existing municipal rideshare regulations along the way with a single set of standardized rules starting in the summer of 2026.
After a one-year pilot, the provincial government intends to roll out a final framework across the entire province. By enabling Private Transportation Companies (PTCs) to provide these services, the government not only exposes prospective rideshare drivers to below minimum wage earnings, but also undermines existing Canadian taxi companies, who will have to continue operating under a much more rigorous set of rules, and risks displacing existing local public transit projects or foreclosing future public transit projects.
After Ontario’s Fall Economic Statement, we didn’t hear much about the next steps for the province’s ground transportation review until last month.
In March 2026, the Ministry of Transportation (MTO), alongside the Ministries of Municipal Affairs and Housing and Rural Affairs, contacted “key stakeholders” to announce consultations with municipalities and other stakeholders on the provincial standardization of rideshare requirements. These stakeholder consultations consisted of three-hour-long consultations, held remotely over four days and were led by Cabinet Office staff. Immediately following the final consultation, MTO posted the pilot proposal to the Ontario Regulatory Registry, seeking final public input on the Northern Rideshare Pilot, before launching the pilot in the spring/early summer of 2026.
The inclusion of the Northern Rideshare Pilot in the Fall Economic Statement, its fast-paced consultation and implementation, and the fact that this project is led by Cabinet Office staff suggest it is a priority for the minister (and/or the premier). Uber, it is worth mentioning, also hired Rubicon, the government relations firm led by Premier Ford’s three-time campaign manager, just months before the announcement.
Uber’s regulatory ask was quickly achieved by linking Uber’s interests to an already existing government initiative, in this case via the “inclusion of the vehicle-for-hire sector as a key stakeholder in Enabling Opportunity: Ontario’s Rural Economic Development Strategy,” as Rubicon put its client’s request in Ontario’s lobbyist registry. Exactly how to hitch Uber to this government commitment towards improving economic opportunities in Ontario’s rural communities must have been the question, and hitching Uber to the planned resurrection of the Northlander Passenger Train was the answer.
Uber’s corporate influence, hidden behind a thin veil of government process, doesn’t stop along the Northlander Train line: the final objective is to roll out Uber’s preferred regulatory model across the province.
Expanding precarious labour practices
The province should not proceed with the Northern Rideshare Pilot without amending and fixing the DPWRA to ensure that large U.S. corporations won’t undercut existing local transportation providers who adhere to Ontario’s hourly minimum wage, Employment Standards Act and existing, more stringent and safer rules for providing essentially the same service, i.e. transporting the travelling public. Other gig economy offerings, such Uber Eats, can follow once a platform has become established in a region; food delivery platforms notoriously pay workers even less than ride-hailing gigs, while reducing the already razor-thin margins of local restaurants.
Meanwhile, conditions in Ontario’s ride-hailing industry continue to deteriorate. The aforementioned University of Toronto wage analysis of 84 million Uber trips was analyzing data from before Uber introduced so-called “upfront pricing,” which uses algorithms to determine the lowest pay a driver accepts on the one hand, and the highest fare a customer agrees to on the other. Since the introduction of Uber’s algorithmic pricing in October of 2024, drivers have reported, and data has shown, that drivers earn even less, while consumers pay more, effectively allowing the company to increase its take rate per trip. Spreading algorithmic pricing completely disassociates drivers’ pay from previously common calculations based on time and distance, leading to even less transparency, accountability and oversight in this sector. In the next consultation following our intervention, staff made it clear that “broader discussions on the oversight of gig work” were “parked for now.”
Ontario’s Ministry of Transportation is not following Quebec’s provincial regulatory regime, which has introduced a level of government oversight over PTC companies unrivalled in Canada, but instead is largely following Toronto’s outsourced rideshare regulations. What is perhaps surprising is that Toronto has been “piloting” these regulations for about 10 years and is perhaps the best-understood market in Canada for the impact that Uber has had on congestion, emissions, drivers’ pay, and public transit—all well documented by City of Toronto-initiated research.
Why do we need to repeat an experiment whose failures have been clearly documented?
The province is using Toronto as its model because Uber has shaped Toronto’s regulatory system in a way that benefits the company at the expense of the competition, the incumbent taxi industry and public transit. Heavy lobbying between 2015 and 2016, and a receptive local government under then-mayor John Tory, led to the deregulation of the vehicle-for-hire sector, including the removal of emission controls, driver training, and fare caps, creating an Uber-friendly environment. And despite current mayor Olivia Chow’s attempts to fix the sector, Uber has gone on the offensive. In October 2023 after reports of Uber’s ultra precarious pay became public, Uber threatened to sue the City of Toronto and waged a misleading public relations campaign against the City. The city council rescinded its attempt and has not touched the file again ever since.
Outsourcing regulatory oversight
What distinguishes Toronto’s rideshare regulations from other attempts to regulate digital platforms is that it places PTC companies like Uber in charge of governing the sector. The city of Toronto issues a business license to a PTC company and delegates licensing and screening, including confirmation of insurance, safety certificates, driver training, and vehicle inspections, to digital platforms that act as intermediaries between drivers and the regulator.
Rideshare drivers in Toronto often hold multiple ride-hailing licenses, including Uber, Lyft, and HOVR. Each time, a prospective driver will have to pay a license fee, undergo a criminal background check, and jump through the same hoops to work on different digital platforms. This cumbersome and costly process increases the odds that a prospective rideshare driver will work for Uber at the expense of competitors, including Canadian rideshare alternatives like HOVR.Since Uber captured the regulatory process in Toronto, the company has become the dominant player, effectively setting the market’s fare and pay practices.
Quebec, on the other hand, licenses drivers directly, issuing one single transferrable license per driver that a driver can use to work for any legal PTC in Quebec, Ontario appears to follow Uber’s preferred model, which means that significant oversight, safety and accountability will not lie with the regulator, but with the company. The regulatory moat Uber has created in Toronto might well be scaled up across the entire province before long.
Government comms claim that the provincial government is acting for rural Ontarians, while it is actually paving the way for a U.S. corporation to disrupt rural communities, pay workers below the minimum wage, and undermine existing local alternatives such as Canadian ride-share platforms, local taxi companies, or public transit providers.
Developing best practices in rideshare regulation
The premier and the minister have not wasted a chance to present Ontario as the first province in Canada to tackle the low-wage problem in the gig economy by demanding that digital platforms pay the minimum wage. But rather than helping the growing number of gig workers in the province, Ford paved the way for legal exploitation, and the below-hourly minimum pay these platforms rely on—and that was before algorithmic pricing changed pay and fare calculations to Uber’s advantage once again.
Provincial regulation of this sector, in theory, could be a real improvement. Not every Ontario municipality or town has the resources to develop regulations, establish a registry, and enforce them. For the province to create a central registry for rideshare drivers and issue a single, transferable license so they can work for any legal PTC would make sense. The same goes for using a system, like in Quebec, that directly collects trip and fare data from electronic meters. Such a system would greatly enhance provincial oversight over passenger, driver and road safety, as well as consumer protection. It may also force PTC companies to treat workers better, or else they will move to a different app.
We have seen some positive developments in several other provinces. In a different digital platform space, the B.C. government passed Bill 35, the Short-Term Rental Accommodations Act, which came into effect in 2024, and operates a central registry for hosts of short-term rentals such as AirBnBs. If a homeowner or tenant wants to rent their own home on a digital platform, they must apply to the province for a single short-term rental license. Hosts can use this license to advertise their home on any legal short-term rental platform. B.C., in other words, does not delegate oversight of the sector to digital platforms, and hosts don’t have to pay for platform-specific licenses.
Quebec passed Bill 17, An Act Respecting Remunerated Passenger Transportation By Automobile, in 2019, which requires drivers to be licensed by the government and brings PTCs and rideshare drivers under provincial rule, setting safety, insurance, fare transparency, and accessibility standards. In MB, the province just introduced Bill 49, the Business Practices Amendment Act, which treats “personalized algorithmic pricing” as an unfair business practice. Taken together, there are provincial examples of how to provincially regulate digital platforms and PTCs to protect workers and consumers alike.
Given the Ford government’s track record on gig work and digital platforms, we can say it is either clueless, acts against the interests of Ontario’s workers and Canadian businesses, or both. The Northlander Rideshare Pilot is just the latest reminder of that.
