With serious issues facing the City of Regina like a $1.3 billion infrastructure deficit and a $238 million shortfall in its pension plan, why is council spending its time and your money worrying about tracking the trips you take in taxis?

A new report going to council is pushing for the city to hire two new employees to have unlimited access to track where people are going in the city by taxi. Supposedly the two new employees will be paid a combined total of about $89,000, but everyone knows that number will shoot up once the employees join the union and city pension plan.

The pair will analyze data from a brand new dispatching system the city wants private cab companies to purchase. Yes, the city has decided it knows what equipment is best for the cab industry and will require the industry to hand over the data they collect.

Part of the city’s claim for requiring the new equipment is to gather data to help determine how many taxi licenses it has in circulation. Yet when some industry participants previously offered to provide data on cab usage, it wasn’t accepted.

With this type of government knows best mindset, how long until the city starts sending around bureaucrats to tell other private businesses what technology they should use? How long until the city tells your office to switch from PCs to Macs?

Just imagine the signal the city is sending to investors. Believe it or not, they see this type of needless government intervention and it makes them cringe. Would you want to invest in a jurisdiction where the government tells private industry what equipment is best for its operations?

The annual leasing cost to the industry for the new equipment is also quite expensive; estimated to be in the range of $203,000 each year. On top of that, each cab company will likely have to hire new staff to manage the data on your travels before handing it over to the government.

But we all know who is going to end up paying for all of these costs at the end of the day – you the consumer.

What’s worse is that the report this idea came from was written by a consultant from Tennessee who gave the Regina cab industry a “good” or “ok” grade in each area he reviewed. But what’s a consultant’s report without recommendations for widespread change?

Between the Tennessee consultant’s report and a similar report commissioned by the city and Regina Airport Authority not long before, a combined $99,960 of public funds have been spent on cab industry studies in the past few years. That’s enough to put up half a dozen really cool play structures for children around town.

Yet the costs don’t end there. If the city starts collecting data on your travels, there’s a good chance someone could challenge the city in court based on invasion of privacy. Give the province’s privacy legislation a quick read and you can see it wasn’t written for the government to track your travels around town.