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License Plate Gallery

Passenger

Passenger is overwhelmingly Ontario's most common registration class, and these plates have gone through numerous design and sequencing changes over the years.

The oldest plates in continuous use feature the slogan "Keep It Beautiful" along the bottom edge, flanked by a sticker box and the embossed date "73." Numbering started at AAA-001. Roughly 3 million sets of plates (covering the A to F serial range) were distributed as part of the original allocation in 1973; the design itself remained unchanged until 1978. Few of these early plates survive on the roads today, making them a rare treat for patient and eagle-eyed spotters.

Although the 1973 series of plates has lasted for 45 years and counting, Ontario didn't originally intend it to. The baseplate was initially intended for a five-year life, and the province would have likely reversed the colour scheme and issued a new white-on-blue base in 1978 if they had stuck to their original plans. Instead, however, the series was extended indefinitely. The "73" date was removed at prefix NKK, and the sticker box was also changed to an open style.

In late 1982 the slogan on Ontario license plates was changed to "Yours to Discover," also used in contemporary tourism promotions. Around the same time, Ontario adopted a staggered registration system and passenger plates began to be transferred with the owner instead of with the vehicle. The alphanumeric sequence was also nearing the end of the alphabet by this point, not leaving a lot of capacity to work with.

The original three-letter prefix series was finally exhausted in 1986. Ontario did the sensible thing and flipped the sequence over to a suffix configuration, allowing for another decade's worth of six-digit combinations. Plates continued to be made of steel in this era, and nearly all of today's surviving examples have been struck by rust or corrosion to at least some degree.

The most dramatic visual change to Ontario plates happened in late 1994, when the province adopted preprinted reflective sheeting. The province also removed the painted border, adopted narrower and harder-to-read dies, and switched materials from rustable steel to lightweight aluminum.

Plate number 999-ZZZ was reached in 1997. Ontario could have extended the six-digit sequence a little longer by delving into previously-skipped letters like G and Q, but the province instead took the opportunity to switch to an inexplicable "AAAA-000" format. The first prefix issued was AAAB, as the AAAA series was initially withheld from general distribution. This format offers far more capacity than Ontario will ever need, and it's been plodding along at the glacial rate of one leading letter per decade ever since.

Although the format of Ontario plates hasn't changed since 1997, the province has gone through a number of materials and manufacturing changes in the years since to keep collectors and spotters on their toes. The first of these happened in 1998, when the supplier of reflective sheeting was changed from 3M to Avery Dennison. The new sheeting featured a slogan printed slightly smaller and higher than it had been previously, and a registration mark was added in the lower left corner.

The Avery plates proved to be less prone to fading than Ontario's earlier reflective plates were. Unfortunately the Avery plates were also extremely prone to blistering and peeling around the embossing of the serial, with many plates displaying signs of failure after just a year or two. The province was not happy, and the Avery contract was abandoned after five years.

Ontario reverted to 3M sheeting in 2003. The registration mark was removed, but the higher slogan printing of the Avery plates was retained.

The province evidently hoped that this change would be the end of license plates blistering and peeling on Ontario roads. Unfortunately that was not to be, as 3M's material quality has gone to pot and many of the newer plates have been wearing worse.

Sometimes the aluminum corrodes around the boltholes or embossing, causing the sheeting to discolour. Sometimes the face of the entire plate will become dark and striated, losing reflectivity in the process. Still other times, plates look fine for a few years...then the sheeting abruptly turns grey, delaminates from the aluminum, flaps around on the plate like a wet rag, and peels off in large shreds. Many of the Ontario plates of the 2007-11 timeframe are completely illegible today, despite being less than a decade old. This problem isn't unique to Ontario (when I left Wisconsin in 2017, there were thousands of plates there peeling just as badly), but it is magnified by numbers here.

Few of the plates I've seen delaminating, striating, and peeling predate 2007. It seems reasonable to theorize that 3M made an engineering or chemical change to its sheeting that year which had the effect of causing the adhesive to destabilize with sustained heat, humidity, or temperature variation. Garaged plates seem less prone to catastrophic failure than those mounted to vehicles stored outside and subjected to Ontario's wild climate variations, though garaged plates may be more prone to striation without delamination.

Often, the catastrophic failures happen to plates around the seventh year. 3M also aggressively lobbies U.S. state governments to replace license plates every seven years, ensuring increased sales of license plate materials to pad their pockets. Coincidence? I doubt it.

The B series of plates began around the start of 2007. This also coincided with the epicentre of bad sheeting.

The French-language slogan tant à découvrir was introduced as an option in this timeframe as well. Unfortunately these plates have continually eluded me for a photo; though a heavily-Anglophone city like London might not be the best place to go about looking for them...

Plates from the latter half of the B series seem less prone to deterioration...for now. It remains to be seen whether they stay that way, or if they're ticking time bombs that will delaminate and peel like the worst of them when they reach their seventh year.

The C series of plates began to appear the week of the ALPCA convention in July 2016. They couldn't have timed that better if they tried:

Shortly thereafter, Ontario broke with tradition by having a batch of plates made in Nova Scotia by Waldale, a contractor that supplies license plates for the rest of Canada. These plates were manufactured in the CASA-CATR series and have a distinctly different die set with flat-top 3s and open 6s and 9s. This die set is also used on Nova Scotia, Alberta, and PEI plates, and originated in the '90s when Waldale started making plates for Mississippi as their first stateside contract.

(Yes, Canada is becoming more like Mississippi...though only on license plates.)

Production resumed in Ontario at the CATS series...at least for a little while. Things haven't totally gotten back to normal, though: The province has continued to order supplementary batches of plates from Waldale ever since. Making matters even more confusing, the contractor started to replicate the Ontario die set in 2017! Newer Waldale plates therefore look nearly identical to "normal" Ontario-made plates, aside from having slightly squarer corners and shorter boltslots. In spite of this, variation-starved Ontario collectors have lapped these up as one more thing to track and keep an eye on:

Matt Embro has been taking meticulous notes of these cutoffs, and may well have found some more by the time you read this.

Personalized Plates

After testing the waters with a scheme where motorists could choose their own combinations in the AAA-000 format for a fee, Ontario began offering proper personalized plates in 1983. Up to six letters or numbers in various combinations were initially allowed, expanded to eight in 2000. These plates cost a hefty penny to order, so it's probably safe to say that the market for them is limited to people who really, really want them.

This personalized "plate" is a photograph of a metal plate printed on a decal and stuck to the bumper of a car. It's of dubious legality; though sixth-generation Corvettes aren't conductive to front license plate mounting to begin with:

Amateur Radio Plates

Since 1976, Ontario motorists with amateur radio licences have been able to request license plates bearing their personal callsign. Amateur Radio plates carry the same "crown in the corner" motif as personalized plates; however, they carry a much more modest fee.

The number in Canadian amateur radio callsigns identifies the province, and all callsigns in Ontario begin with either "VE3" or "VA3." Unlike in U.S. states, out-of-zone callsign plates are very uncommon in Ontario.

Passenger-Related Types

Ontario is notorious for issuing numerous license plate types for occupations and governmental roles that are indistinguishable from regular passenger license plates aside from the letters in the serial. Many of these are quite scarce. Also falling into the realm of passenger-related types are Historic Vehicle plates for vehicles more than 30 years old, and the newer (and increasingly common) "Green Vehicle" plates for plug-in electric vehicles.

Special Graphic Plates

Starting in 1994, Ontario leveraged the capabilities of preprinted sheeting to offer a line of graphical license plates commemorating various organizations, sports teams, and causes. Some commemorate nothing, and are nothing more than extra-fee graphics.

I'm not a big fan of these plates, so I don't go out of my way to photograph them. Virtually all of them look alike at a distance, with an unintelligble blob of a graphic on the left side and an illegible scrunched-together serial on the right side. These also carry high registration premiums, yet they fall apart on the road just as easily as cheaper plates.

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