This is the predictable result when you put government bureaucrats in control. Canada's National Post and the Washington Post have articles. In the Financial Post, Lawrence Solomon summarizes:
"In Ontario, car pooling is a prohibited activity that can only be allowed under strict government control, as determined by a government regulatory agency set up to oversee such conduct. Those who violate the law – as did a nonplused outfit called PickupPal — can and will be punished with the full force of the law. With the government's blessings, you can share expenses by car pooling from home to work and back again, but only under certain conditions. You have crossed the line if you try to car pool to work across a municipal boundary — the government frowns upon suburbanites who commute this way. As for car pooling for a frivolous, non-work purpose — to school, to the hockey arena, to the doctor’s office — this is outlawed outright, regardless of whether you cross a municipal boundary."
The more power you hand to regulators, the more often you get back-room back-scratching that protects other members of the in-guild (in this case, a bus company). Sometimes, there's enough public outrage to overturn it. Most of the time, there isn't.
In my opinion, the government exists to serve the people, and I am outraged whenever they take actions which are clearly against the public interest. Usually there are large amount of money involved, possibly in someone's back pocket.
Case in point, they started letting these private companies build tollways around here, and as part of the deal they made with them, they shut down or redirected public roads that had been paid for with our money, to force people to use the toll roads. It's totally unacceptable and I will never, ever vote for someone who allows that sort of thing. However, unfortunately, few people seem to feel likewise. In my opinion it should be illegal to make deals like this and I'd like to see people go to jail over it. However, it's never going to happen unless the voters wake up from their nap. They just keep re-electing these clowns, and I'll never understand why.
In my opinion - if they aren't in power to serve our interests, why are they in power at all? To make themselves and their buddies rich? Disgusting.
I'm amused by the notion that government exists to serve the people. Governments are an evolved form of protection racket, and not all that highly evolved at times. They exist to serve themselves. Sometimes they best serve themselves by appearing to serve the public, and sometimes the best way to appear to serve the public is to actually serve them, but we must never lose sight of what's really going on. Because the only hope of limiting the damage government does is to recognize it's true nature, and craft a system of incentives such that government minimizes the damage for it's own benefit.
Because that's the only benefit it's ever REALLY working for.
It reminds me far too much of the attempt in Quebec some 20 years ago to regulate family construction projects. It simply would not do for the brothers and brothers-in-law to get together and perform an act so heinous as repairing their parents' garage.
Jokes abounded about the coming 'Regie des beau-freres' (Brother-in-law Management Commission). I, in contrast, chose to leave Canada forever.
The later human rights travails of Steyn, Levant, and others merely confirm the wisdom of that choice.
Solomon concludes his article by claiming the government must choose whether "[t]o back tomorrow’s vibrant high-tech growth industries or yesterday’s outdated monopolies." Nowhere is there even the suggestion that any company should only be the incidental beneficiary of the government's choice to support liberty.
Government always prefers to strangle independent business
via extinction by regulation or outright legislative bans in order to create monopolies that enable politicians to reward their financial supporters. The history of suppression of jitney taxis in the US is a prime example. Used elsewhere in the world in various permutations to solve transport problems that governments are unable to, we here in the US prefer multi-billion dollar boondoggles for "light-rail" systems that are limited in scope, utilized by single digit rider-ships and soak up untold tax dollars in govt subsidies because they can't pay their own way. Or, alternatively, demand a king's ransom for taxi licenses/medallions to limit competition. Why is anyone surprised about Ontario?