Ontario B Licence Plates

Christmas came early. I spotted an Ontario “B” licence plate.

About ten years ago, when neighbours of ours got a new car, I noticed Ontario had abandoned the old three-number, three-letter (123 ABC) sequence for its licence plates. The plates on Stan’s new van had an ABCD 123 sequence. His actual plate started AA….

In 1999 we got a new plate starting “AD…” and I realized the province was rolling out its plate numbers sequentially. On long driving trips over the next several years, I watched with idle curiosity as the sequence rolled on: AJ, AM, AP, AT, AV. It seemed a couple of new letters were emerging about every six months, and I usually had at least a rough awareness of the new ones to be on the lookout for.

I never intended to become a trainspotter, but last summer when AX and AY plates were commonplace, I was watching carefully for the first AZ. Spotted one on the highway back from Stratford, actually, and that got me on the watch for the first of the Bs.

The other night at a seasonal gathering, someone was talking about the never-too-obscure subjects you can find covered in internet discussion forums. I mentioned, just a little shamefaced, that I had actually looked to see if anyone was covering the Ontario licence plate rollout – and had found nothing. Whereupon another guest said she and her father had been collecting sightings for years. And they had just seen their first B, on Lakeshore highway in Toronto. They too had thought they were the only ones interested. We had an animated discussion for a few minutes before we discovered there really wasn’t much to say about it. Colin is a journalist, however, and wondered if there was a story in it.

I didn’t know whether to be pleased someone else shares my hobby or annoyed I had been beaten to the first sighting in the Bs.

Today as I was parking in front of my house, my neighbour Nancy jumped out what must be a new Land Rover and called out Merry Christmas. And I said, “You have a B licence plate!”

It’s BA no less. One of the very first of the Bs. Checking about, I have found one forum on the topic. Several people on it, with the same surprise that anyone else cares, report having acquired or spotted B plates in December. People are watching.

The historical significance here, and I know I’m stretching to provide one, is how rapidly this province consumes new licence plates, which is largely a function of how quickly we acquire new automobiles, which in turn is the sustenance of our automotive-driven economy. Still, if it has taken a decade to get through the As, we could presumably continue at this present rate for about 250 years.

Suddenly I wonder what the license plates at my funeral will be reading.

History in the Daily Papers

Jim Phillips, new editor of the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History, has a good succinct article about the Osgoode Society and its work in legal history in the National Post. It is here if you can get through all the ads and re-directs that the bloody CanWest oligopoly imposes on us all.

And Val Ross at The Globe and Mail covers the Harper government's thoughts on supporting National Museums in cities other than Ottawa. I must say I am sympathetic. The network of museums and cultural institutions around Ottawa has helped make that city into a true national capital, but not every new museum has to be there.

Must say, however, I'm less keen on having corporate sponsorship be the trigger for new federal museums. EnCana's offer to subsidize a National Portrait Gallery in Calgary is rumoured to be the origin of the goverment's new policy initiative.

Ottawa ought to separate the outside-Ottawa policy from the buy-yourself-a-National-Museum offer. And dump the second one into the Ottawa River.

Bilson Prize: Pamela Porter

I missed this one, but you probably did too. In October the Children's Book Centre awarded the 2006 Bilson Prize (for historical fiction for children) to Pamela Porter for a Prairie historical novel called The Crazy Man. Same book also won the TD Children's Book of the Year prize -- the one with the $20,000 purse, so Pamela Porter is doing well by that work. Good for her.

Silver Donald Sails Away

Canadian book publishing is, of necessity, full of curious and inventive strategems, but this one is unusual.

My old friend Silver Donald Cameron has a new book Sailing Away from Winter, a memoir of a long southward cruise he and his wife and dog took in the ketch Magnus. I've read enough of SDC to expect it will be an excellent book. But his publisher, the estimable Doug Gibson, has decided to launch it when the book mart is less crowded and there will be prospects for more critical attention and bookstore space. So it's to be a Spring 2007 launch.

Fair enough, except SDC, an indefatigable promoter, has made his forthcoming work well known, particularly in Nova Scotia, and there is demand: SDC's people want this book, or they want to give this book for Christmas. So it's out in in the bookstores -- but only in the Maritimes. (Well, you can order online from www.capebretonbooks.com, actually.)

Actually I like this idea. Flexibility is always a good idea in publishing. But mostly I'm just noting this to plug what's sure to be a good book by a good writer. There's a story about the book and its origins at The Halifax Herald website.

John Webster Grant 1919-2006

A modest obituary notice reports the death on December 16 of John Webster Grant, eminent church historian. It notes he was a professor and a Rhodes Scholar, but doesn't mention he was the author of many historical works including, perhaps most notably, Moon of Wintertime (1984), a survey of relations between missionaries and First Nations in Canada. He was also an editor at Ryerson Press way back when it was the centre of Canadian publishing.

Bruce Trigger 1937-2006

Bruce Trigger, archeologist and savant, died in Montreal recently of pancreatic cancer. Make no mistake, Trigger stood among the great Canadian historians -- even as he mostly stood apart from the rest of them.

I've said for years that the really profound story in Canadian history is the five hundred year epic of the collision of aboriginal and immigrant cultures in the northern half of North America. I started to understand that reading Trigger's The Children of Aataentsic. It is still, I'd say, the place to start to grasp that deep reality of Canadian history.

It happened that I read that huge book during a summer back in the 1970s when we lived close by the banks of the Gatineau River north of Ottawa. When I read that Huron traders around 1600, seeking to avoid conflict on the St. Lawrence, sometimes travelled down the Ottawa and turned up that same Gatineau River to cross central Quebec and come down to salt water at Tadoussac, suddenly I understood something about pre-contact Canadians, their networks of trade and diplomacy, and their sense of their country, that has never left me.

I interviewed Bruce Trigger once, for an Ideas documentary on CBC Radio. He was a great scholar, but it was not so as the media would notice. I had the strong sense I was the first person to interview him seriously and at length about his work and his views. Neither of us were very media savvy, actually. He was concerned that phone calls might interrupt our conversation, so we moved from his office to an empty classroom. What did I know about acoustics?

The interview sounded like he was speaking from the bottom of a well.

But his ideas rang out clear, I think. And he seemed to take my teccy failings in stride. I met him twice thereafter, at historical conferences, and both times he made me feel like an old and trusted colleague.

Sandra Martin's obit is at the Globe & Mail site.

Vote buying; our substitute for democracy

I liked the news story last weekend that Alberta artists were buying up Conservative leadership votes, available at $5 a pop, in order to vote for Jim Dinning. Dinning, y'see, had promised increases to arts funding, while the other candidates mostly wanted longer hunting seasons on artists, pretty much.

Some of those artists are probably friends of mine, and I'm pretty confident few would ever vote Conservative in a real election, even if Jim Dinning led it. They were merely investing $5 in a chance to skew the results in a party they mostly loathe.

Okay I can understand how a free-enterprise ideologue might advocate putting political power up for auction at $5 a vote. What I can't grasp is why so many people, in all our political parties, go on calling this kind of thing "democracy."