The BC government's decision to postpone ride sharing services until next year isn't sitting well with a Kelowna councillor.
Ryan Donn says Thursday's news was the opposite of what he wanted to hear.
"Kelowna unfortunately has the distinction of being one of the highest drinking and driving areas currently, and we need to reduce that. And how we reduce that is by giving people options - but I've had lots of friends say it takes like an hour to wait for a taxi in Kelowna to get home," he said.
"I took an Uber in Calgary like three years ago, and we don't have it here? So it's really disappointing. I think we should have Uber here by now."
In a 2015 Statistics Canada report, Kelowna had the second-highest rate of drunk driving among Canadian cities.
Donn says he was happy to see the province ban corporate and union donations to political parties last year, but says announcements like the one this week make him skeptical about the government's motivations.
"It just doesn't make sense to delay it, unless there's an ulterior motive. Because it's not about the public at this point, it's about catering to an industry. The announcements were all industry support-based," he said.
"It's almost unacceptable. It's frustrating they're not focusing on the public, because every single party said they wanted ride sharing as part of the last election."
During that campaign, the NDP committed to ride sharing by Christmas of 2017.
After forming government, that deadline was pushed to Christmas of this year, before yesterday's announcement to delay it almost another full year.
The previous Liberal government had developed ride sharing legislation only at the very end of its term, and had promised a rollout by the end of last year.
He says while there's some good that was announced, a lot of it sounds like things already announced by those Liberals.
"They have actually agreed to fund more accessible taxis, that's actually a really big positive," he said.
"But you talk about the app. We had a million-dollar announcement about an app in 2016 when the Liberal government was in power. So now they're going to announce a new app? I'm sorry, we already had that announcement two years ago."
Donn's reference is to an announcement in March 2017, that had the government committing up to a million dollars for the development of a mobile app for taxi operators, that would mirror the ones used by Uber and Lyft.
Given existing issues like unreasonably long wait times and the impaired driving rate, he says the idea floated by the government that the delay is about safety is simply political spin.