Next week in Toronto history: Pearson blockaded by airport taxi drivers on June 20, 2005

Taxi and limo drivers, fed up with the airport authority’s licensing system, blocked three roads leading out of Pearson.
Anti-Uber taxi protesters who gridlocked City Hall’s surrounding streets last December were reviled by downtown commuters — but their protest didn’t come close to one 10 years earlier on June 20, 2005, that blockaded Pearson International Airport for a day.
Fliers travelling to and from Pearson on June 21, 2005 were met by knots of determined taxi and limo drivers blocking entrances to all three of the airport’s terminals. Thousands sweltered in their cars.
Protests continued into the evening. The OPP even shut down a section of Highway 427 near the airport. “It’s absolutely absurd,” Roy Jacoby, a trapped driver, told the Star.
Frustration on the cabbies’ part stemmed from how the Greater Toronto Airports Authority handled taxicab licences (sound familiar?) — issued to cab companies, not individual drivers. They complained that this shut the drivers themselves out of the process and demanded that the GTAA issue limo licences to individual cabbies, starting with the most senior.
The GTAA took protesters to court the very next day and got an injunction prohibiting another blockade — but the judge ruled that gridlock-free protests would be allowed to continue.