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The Ford government’s licence-plate plan makes a lot of sense

OPINION: The decision to automatically renew plates for drivers in good standing is a good one. It’s actually kind of weird that it took us this long to figure it out
Written by Matt Gurney
Premier Doug Ford attends a press conference in Mississauga on February 13. (Christopher Katsarov/CP)

We would probably all be better off if what was good for the broader public and what the politicians felt was good for themselves more often perfectly aligned.

But we actually do have one of those happy occasions unfolding in the province this week. It’s not a particularly big deal, on the scale of many of the challenges we face, but the decision to automatically renew licence plates for drivers in good standing is a good one. It’s actually kind of weird that it took us this long to figure it out.

Let’s set up a bit of context here before we go any further. The first, most important layer of context is that the premier loves cars. Not as a collector, but as a politician. He has definitely taken a side in the so-called war on the car, and he is all in on the automobile. This goes back to his time at city council, when his late brother was mayor. One of the stupider divides in our politics is the one between “transit” and “the car” and, if we really want to make everybody miserable, we can add in “the cyclists” as well. It really shouldn’t be that hard to set up a situation where we figure out how to efficiently move people from place to place, and if human beings were less dumb, fewer of us would invest at least some measure of our self-identity in how we get around.

I have a bike. I ride transit. I have a car that I drive. I take Ubers. None of these things really informs how I conceive of myself. But for a lot of other people, this is a big deal. The politics of mobility are no less passionate for being kind of dumb. I suspect they might in fact be more passionate for being kind of dumb. And Ford knows which side he’s on.

It was just two years ago when his government — in a move aimed right at Ford’s base — announced it was waiving the fees to renew licence plates. Remember the stickers? We didn’t have to buy those anymore. But Ford did not eliminate the requirement to renew the licence plate. You still had to do that. A lot of people screw that up, and I will confess, that includes this intrepid columnist. I totally forgot to renew my plate and was lucky to get a reminder instead of a ticket. I never made that mistake again, but it was an irritation at the time. No more than that. Readers may recall we had someotherstuff going on around that time. But I remember thinking, in a fleeting moment of distraction before returning my focus to all the other stuff that was going wrong, that it was dumb to eliminate a renewal fee, but not the renewal process. Was this really the best that we could do?

No. It wasn’t. What the government proposed this week makes a lot more sense. Licence-plate renewals will be automatic in addition to being free. The government has said, and this makes sense, that the renewals will be automatic only for drivers in good standing. If you have unpaid tickets or do not have valid insurance, you won’t get automatically renewed. So long as you keep your affairs in order, you’ll be good.

And this is fine? I understand the argument that licence-plate renewal fees were a way of shifting some of the costs imposed on the provincial treasury by widespread use of the car onto those using the cars. I’m sure there are people who would still like to make that argument, and God bless ’em, but Ford is not one of those people. His party has a majority in the legislature. And moving to this system of automatic renewal for drivers in good standing is a sensible policy, in line with his ideology and voter-base preferences, that will slightly streamline the lives of millions of Ontarians.

Great. Let’s get it done.

We could spend a bit more time analyzing the how and the why, but I’m not sure too much is needed. There have been some signs of late that the Ford government is getting a little bit nervous. There definitely seems to be concern about new Liberal leader Bonnie Crombie. On top of that, a Conservative federal government, which looks likely, wouldn’t be a plus for Ford. He’ll lose legislators and staffers as experienced people move down the 401 to take on new, exciting jobs in a new government, escaping what will, by then, be a fairly old Ford government, one weighed down by all the usual baggage any government accumulates, plus all the weird stuff Ford loves foisting upon himself.

That’s all the way in the future. There’s no point spending too much time speculating on that now. Suffice it to say, I expect we will continue to see little gestures like this from the premier’s office over the next few years. Things to keep the base happy and give his potentially restless staff and elected members good-news stories to share with their constituents, even as the government grows ever longer in the tooth.

We should have no doubt that some of the shiny baubles offered up by the PCs will be dumb.  Some will probably be pointless or even outright harmful. But this is one that the base will like and that actually seems like a reasonably good idea, all things considered. So let’s celebrate that. And let’s hope for more. Like I said at the top, we’d all be better off if smart politics and smart policy aligned more often.