MONTREAL — A Cote St. Luc cab driver vows he will launch an immediate appeal if a municipal court orders him to pay $1,400 in tickets for having Jewish religious artifacts and personal items in his taxi.
Arieh Perecowicz
“Within 24 hours, I will do it,” Arieh Perecowicz promised in a phone interview with The CJN.
The 65-year-old native Israeli, who’s been driving a cab mostly in Montreal’s west end for 43 years, was referring to his scheduled date in municipal court this week and his almost three-year battle to keep photos of his family, small Israeli and Canadian flags, and a Remembrance Day poppy affixed neatly to the dashboard of his Veterans taxi.
Most significantly, the alleged offences also apply to several Jewish religious items he also carries in his cab: a photo of the late Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Schneerson, and two mezuzot, which are attached between the front and back seats.
Perecowicz said that’s a breach of his religious freedom.
The six tickets Perecowicz has been given since December 2006 were all issued by the Bureau du taxi, a municipal agency that regulates the industry.
“I’ve ignored them all,” he said.
In February 2007, Perecowicz also filed a complaint with the Quebec Human Right Commission (QHRC), which has agreed to hear the case, but which can take several years to investigate and rule on.
That makes no difference to Perecowicz, who believes that regulation Number 98 of the Bureau’s bylaws, which prohibits a taxi from carrying “objects or inscriptions” not required for the taxi to “be in service,” is far too vague.
“There are two things wrong with it,” he said: “First, there’s no list of what you can have or cannot have, and second, it’s beyond the mandate of [the Bureau to address religious rights]. That’s a Charter issue, a federal issue.”
As well, “There is no clutter in my car,” Perecowicz said. “It’s clean, and doesn’t interfere with anything in the back seat.”
Despite recent tongue-in-cheek media stories about him, Perecowicz is taking his case very seriously and said the whole thing has been an ordeal. He believes he’s being singled out by the Bureau, because only two days before receiving his first ticket in 2006, he and others cabbies complained on television that the Bureau was too lax about tolerating unlicensed cabs in the city.
“Two days later. A little bit coincidental, isn’t it?” Perecowicz asked. “For 43 years, nobody complained. How coincidental could it be?”
Perecowicz said he conducted research going back 16 years, and as far as he could tell, no other cab driver has ever been issued a ticket for the same infraction.
“Look inside any Greek [driver’s] taxi,” he said. “You won’t see one that doesn’t have a religious icon of the Madonna in it, or beads.”
And how is having personal items in his taxi, Perecowicz wondered, any different that a doctor having family photos in his office?
“You can say when a member of the public comes into the office, that’s a ‘public space,’ too,” he said.
While Perecowicz doesn’t believe there was any anti-Semitism “per se” in the Bureau, he believes that in retaliating for his actions on the unlicensed cabs issue, the Bureau deliberately chose to enforce a regulation that would hit him “where it hurts.
“Personal and religious articles mean something to me,” Perecowicz said. “They could have given me a ticket for [some minor infraction], but they didn’t.
“That’s the part that I think was discriminatory and anti-Semitic.
“When someone chooses to get you vis-à-vis your religion, then I would like you to define for me what it means.”
Since the issue erupted, Perecowicz said he enlisted the support of the Quebec Jewish Congress (QJC).
Abby Shawn, chair of QJC’s human rights committee, told The CJN that while Perecowicz’s situation has the potential makings of a Charter case, it’s not there yet.
That could develop, she said, once the QHRC makes its ruling. “It does raise certain issues,” she said, but the main one before the municipal court appeared to be the “vagueness” of Bureau regulation Number 98.
Perecowicz, meanwhile, said he has received only positive feedback from people who enter his cab, even in his rare trips to the city’s east end.
His situation has also take a toll, despite support from his wife Valerie and their three children
“It’s been gehinom [hell],” Perecowicz said. “It’s probably already cost me double the amount of the tickets, time from work, and sleep, sometimes two, three or four hours.
“But when they made the decision to go after me, they picked the wrong person,” he said.
A woman who answered the phone at the Bureau du taxi said it was not prepared to respond to requests for comment before the court proceedings this week.
