As ride-hailing service Uber is fighting for its life in London, it has announced that it will be stop operations in Quebec Canada next month due to tough new regulations announced last week.
According to Uber’s Quebec general manager, Jean-Nicolas Guillemette, the company would cease operations in the province on Oct. 14.
Uber currently employs more than 50 office workers in the province, where more than 10,000 drivers have worked for the company.
Reuters reports that the company left room to reverse its decision, calling on the government to reconsider regulations announced on Friday that tightened up the rules of a pilot project that had let Uber operate since October last year.
“We’re asking the government to renew the pilot project and let’s sit down and find a solution to this,” Guillemette said.
A spokesman for Quebec’s transport minister said the province would not budge on new rules requiring drivers to undergo 35 hours of training and to have their criminal background checks validated by Quebec police instead of third parties.
During the pilot, Uber drivers were ticketed for not identifying their vehicles, driving cars that were too old, and accepting rides hailed off the street, while some were also found to have criminal records, said Mathieu Gaudreault, spokesman for Laurent Lessard, Quebec’s minister for transportation.
“We can negotiate with them, but not on the basis of those two things,” Gaudreault said.
He said Uber had paid the province around C$7 million ($5.68 million) in fees during the pilot which would fund efforts to modernize the province’s taxi industry.
Taxi operators have opposed Uber’s presence in Quebec, sometimes blocking traffic during protests in Montreal.
