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EDITORIAL: How about new plates for everyone?

February 27, 2020   ·   0 Comments

FOR THE FIRST TIME since 1973, when the government of the day decided against replacing all licence plates annually as a cost-saving measure, our current government decided it was time to have new plates and a new design.

But instead of inviting the public to propose the new design, or perhaps following jurisdictions by coming up with a multi-coloured plate, the Ford administration simply ordered new plates from 3M Canada that would be Tory Blue and promote the province as “A Place to Grow” or, in the case of commercial vehicles, “Open for Business.”

Unfortunately, one thing the government didn’t insist on was readability, something the plates had in daylight hours but not at night when, apparently, only the blue background was reflectorized.

Now, with some 200,000 of the new plates produced, the government has asked 3M to come up with plates that can be read both day and night.

Perhaps that will be accomplished without doing much more than having the numbers, not the background, reflectorized. 

But maybe after nearly a half century of never-changing plates, we should have a competition for a really different, attractive plate that would go out on all our vehicles, not just those for new vehicles and those newly purchased.

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