From the sidewalk, Krystian Kozinski’s two-car garage looks like any other on his cul-de-sac. But step inside and you’ll quickly see, plastering nearly every inch of the walls and ceiling, his overwhelming collection of licence plates — thousands of them, mostly from Canada, and the majority of those from Ontario.
“When I bought a house, I needed a garage, and was looking to decorate a bit,” says Kozinski, who owns a renovation business in Brantford, adding that he collected his first plate a decade ago on a trip to France. But much of his attention soon shifted to his home province.
He’s since added countless more Ontario rarities, including plates from the Lieutenant Governor’s vehicle, Queen Elizabeth II’s royal visit in 1984, inverted “error” plates, and a nearly complete set of current graphics. He’s also asked the ministry of transportation about getting his own design — a specialty plate celebrating licence plate collecting itself — approved for production.
While Kozinski’s garage may seem unusual in his neighbourhood, it is far from unique in Ontario, where licence plate collecting has a long and surprising history — and hobbyists scour the province at regular meet-ups for the missing pieces of their collections.
“It’s like a cult,” Kozinski jokes.
Once upon a time in Toronto
All Canadian licence plates today can trace their roots back to Ontario, where, in 1903, Queen’s Park became the first provincial government in the country to mandate their use. The catch? A $2 registration fee collected from both Ontarians and out-of-province drivers visiting temporarily, according to Ontario Licence Plates: A Century of History by long-time collector Joseph Sallmen.
Licence plates were novel back then, and politicians, business magnates, and other elites who could readily afford an automobile would snap up those featuring low numbers, which were considered a sign of prestige. But those earliest plates were crude by today’s standards: they were made-to-order for the province by a Toronto-area saddlery shop, constructed of aluminum house numbers riveted to leather pads.
Keith Murphy has thousands of Canadian licence plates displayed and stored in his Alberta workshop. (Ethan Jakob Craft)
Sallmen’s book shows how Ontario continued to tinker with its licence plates in the years that followed. The province began experimenting with plates made of rubber slabs in 1905, in need of something more durable than leather.
“Longevity is probably one of the key things they were trying to nail down early on,” says Eric Vettoretti, 48, a federal procurement officer in Ottawa who’s been collecting plates since he was a teenager. “And then cost. The province was always trying to get the best price and get a cheaper per-plate expenditure.”
Visibility issues eventually helped foil the rubber licence plates, Vettoretti theorizes. Ontario switched to a vibrant cobalt blue design baked in porcelain enamel in 1911, before introducing a steel plate the following year. There was little cohesion for the first couple of decades, as the province awarded one-off contracts to a number of private suppliers. It was only in 1931 that licence plate manufacturing was centralized as a prison industry.
In 1905, Ontario tapped the Toronto-based Gutta Percha & Rubber Co. to make the province’s licence plates out of heavy duty rubber slabs. (Ethan Jakob Craft)
The march of progress
The earliest common ancestor of Ontario’s modern plates arguably dates from 1937: the crown graphic, which was first struck on plates that year to honour the coronation of King George VI. But unlike in Saskatchewan and Newfoundland, Ontario didn’t drop its commemorative design the following year.
“I think there’s always been a lot more allegiance to the Crown in Ontario than other provinces,” says Vettoretti, adding that the only year the emblem has been absent from the plates was 1951. “And there was so much outcry [in 1951], the crown was brought back the next time they issued plates in ‘53,” he says.
Vettoretti sees a parallel in Ontarians opposition to creating a new national flag in 1965, which, in turn, led the province to adopt its own version of the Red Ensign that same year.
But innovation hasn’t always been optional when it comes to licence plates.
Due to metal shortages during the Second World War, for example, many licence plates on Ontario’s roads in 1943 were actually surrendered 1942 issues that had been flipped over, repainted, and restamped with a new number. In 1944, those same plates were revalidated with a windshield sticker — the precursor to yearly renewal tabs — so no new steel was needed for the process whatsoever.
In the mid-1950s, at the behest of automakers in Detroit, Ontario then entered a pact with government agencies across North America to standardize the size of all passenger licence plates to 12 inches long, six inches tall, and with mounting holes seven inches apart.
By 1965, the current blue-and-white colour scheme had become all but permanently enshrined. Less than a decade later, Ontario minted its first plate slogan, “Keep It Beautiful” (which was narrowly chosen over “Province of Opportunity”) before adopting the now-familiar “Yours to Discover” in 1980.
Like many other provinces and U.S. states at the time, Ontario’s 1911 licence plates were made out of porcelain enamel — though their cost, weight, and fragility led Queen’s Park to introduce steel plates the following year. (Ethan Jakob Craft)
One man’s trash
While most Canadians don’t give their licence plates a second thought after they bolt them onto their car, there’s a small but dedicated community of enthusiasts who research, track, document and collect them.
The Automobile Licence Plate Collectors Association, founded in 1954, is the largest organization dedicated to the hobby, with thousands of members who have woven a comprehensive network of plate archives, publications, and buy-and-sell meets. (Ontario is home to two of Canada’s largest such events, which are held annually in Acton and Grimsby.)
“I was already a coin collector,” says Thomas Zimmermann, originally from Russell, who reckons he was drawn into plate collecting thanks to his passion for cars, and licence plates being “on the affordable side of antiquing.”
Ontario celebrated the 1937 coronation of King George VI with a double-crown graphic on its licence plates, which has remained a design staple on almost all of the province’s plates that have been issued since. (Ethan Jakob Craft)
Zimmerman, 26, looks forward to the meet-ups every year, just as much for their social aspect as their treasure troves of metal rectangles. “While meets don’t necessarily produce the best plates for your collection, they do produce the best connections,” he says.
Attendance at those Ontario meets pales in comparison to “The National,” an annual convention in the U.S. that draws hundreds of dues-paying ALPCA members from all corners of the continent and beyond. Some aging diehards have been attending it for more than 50 summers in a row.
Among those making the pilgrimage to next month’s “National” in Fort Wayne, Indiana, is Calgary native Keith Murphy who, despite only being active in the hobby since 2017, has amassed what is believed to be the most complete collection of Canadian licence plates in existence.
“I like the history, the uniqueness … And the friendships that I’ve built because of this hobby,” says Murphy, who co-owns Strathmore, Alberta-based Talet Equipment. He’s currently hunting at least one passenger plate from every province and territory for every year they were dated.
He is three plates away from what he considers completion: he needs a wartime 1942 Northwest Territories, the territory’s second year of issue; a 1926 Yukon, and an elusive 1903 leather plate from Ontario. And if one were to become available at July’s U.S. convention, Murphy says he’d “make a play for it for sure.”
Securing one may be easier said than done, though. With the first-issue Ontarios, for example, just 13 genuine examples are known to have survived — and in the current market, they come with solidly five-figure price tags. But few licence plate collectors seem to be deterred by an uphill battle.
“That budget’s always available should it arise,” Murphy says.