Taxi driver Arieh Perecowicz adjusts a small plaque with the Prayer for the Road printed in Hebrew that he keeps in his cab. He has been fined four times by taxi inspectors for having religious icons, poppies, photos of his family and a Canadian flag in his cab.
_ Photograph by: John Mahoney, The Gazette
By René Bruemmer - MONTREAL - A veteran Montreal taxi driver who was fined for having pictures of his daughter and of a rabbi in his cab, along with a Canadian flag, two small religious symbols and a Remembrance Day poppy, has lost his case to have the charges against him dropped.
Montreal Municipal Court Judge Joly Dominique ruled Thursday morning that Arieh Perecowicz was guilty. Perecowicz, who is 66 years old and has been driving a cab for 44 of them, was fined $191 four times between 2006 and 2008 by Montreal Taxi Bureau inspectors under Section 98 of the bylaw, which bans any “object or inscription that is not required for the taxi to be in service.”
Perecowicz said he would appeal the decision "all the way to the Supreme Court, if I have to."
He was ordered to pay a total of $1,300, about $600 of that for court costs. The judge was lenient in the amount, Perecowicz said. The tickets alone amounted to $1,400, with some as high as $400 because they constituted second offences.
Perecowicz said he would not remove the items from his cab.
The cabbie is contesting the bylaw, saying it infringes on his freedom of expression guaranteed in the Quebec Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms. He has also lodged a complaint with the Quebec Human Rights Commission, seeking $5,000 from the city of Montreal for its “discriminatory and unlawful bylaw.” The commission has said it would not release its decision until the court ruling was handed down.
“I’m fighting because I know I’m right,” Perecowicz said of his four-year battle. “If I should take them out, so should Christians have to take out their cross, or Muslims their beads. ...
“Democracy and freedom do not come cheap. Some people pay with their lives. ... Look at what’s happening in Egypt.”
During a seven-day trial in which Perecowicz, acting in his own defence, subpoenaed eight Montreal Taxi Bureau inspectors to appear, inspector Stephanie Johnson testified that the fines had nothing to do with the religious nature of some of the objects, but because he had too much stuff in his 2001 Chevrolet Lumina, “creating the overwhelming sensation of so many things coming at you.”
The taxi bureau usually tolerates drivers having “one simple little article,” but not a large cluster, she said.
Had he been told that in the first place, Perecowicz said, he would have complied. But he said he was told he could have nothing at all, and the inspectors changed their story during the court case.
He said the timing of his first fine makes him think he is being singled out for punishment. In 2006, Perecowicz was leading a group of taxi drivers trying to crack down on the illegal transport of seniors by unlicensed cabbies. Two days after he gave a television interview criticizing the Montreal Taxi Bureau for not doing enough to curb the problem, an inspector turned up at his regular taxi stand near the Cavendish Mall and gave him a ticket for displaying too many items in his vehicle – the first such ticket he had received in four decades as a cab driver.
The same inspector had looked over his car three weeks before during a routine inspection, Perecowicz testified, and gave him a ticket for not filling out his daily log book. Nothing was said then about having too many items in the cab, he said.
Other taxi drivers are backing him up, although even one of his friends said this year he found the number of items on Perecowicz’s dashboard “excessive,” and that it looked “like a circus.”
Perecowicz has changed cars. He now drives a 2007 Malibu. He still has many similar items in the car, but they are smaller and placed so that most, including three images of his rabbi the size of playing cards, are not visible from the back seat. Two mezuzahs (small decorative cases containing prayers often seen in the entranceway to Jewish homes) are embedded discreetly in the posts between the front and rear seats.
Two weeks ago, Perecowicz received another $191 ticket for having the items in his car. It’s the fourth ticket he has received since he started fighting his case, bringing the total number of tickets to eight.
rbruemmer@montrealgazette.com