The Ontario Government has introduced a new driver’s licence design as well as new designs for personal and commercial licence plates, aiming to enhance the quality, design and production of the products while saving taxpayers money, according to the announcement on April 15.
The driver’s licence design will be available in the fall and all licence plates will have the new design starting in February 2020. Ontario passenger plates will say “A Place to Grow” in reference to Ontario’s unofficial “A Place to Stand, a Place to Grow” anthem that debuted at Expo ’67, while commercial plates will say “Open for Business” to reflect the government’s “commitment to economic growth and job creation.” The government is ensuring that police have the necessary tools to keep roads and communities safe by improving the quality of licence plates and keeping both the front and rear licence plates on vehicles, according the announcement.
“Ontario’s new passenger and commercial licence plates represent what good government is all about,” said Bill Walker, minister of Government and Consumer Services. “We are putting people back at the centre of every decision; making Ontario a business-friendly and pro-jobs province; and protecting what matters most so we can ensure Ontario is a place to grow: a place to grow your family, a place to grow your business, and a place to grow your community.”
The plates and licences will include a new version of Ontario’s trillium logo as part of a new brand identity, which also includes the slogan “Working for You,” that will be implemented across the entire government. The government issued a visual identity directive across the public sector that will prohibit spending taxpayer dollars on new logos or other visual identifiers in the future, saying that “the ministries and agencies of the Ontario government wasted more than $2 million on visual identity work” since 2011.
“We promised to work hard for you and provide you with a better, more people-focused government,” said Peter Bethlenfalvy, president of the Treasury Board. “By making this new brand and visual identity a government-wide standard, we are also saving taxpayers’ money by putting a stop to a wasteful practice that we saw taking place across government.”
Bethlenfalvy said that the new trillium logo was designed to meet the highest standards of accessibility while also being digitally friendly and adaptable across platforms and in both English and French. Existing visual identifiers will be retired and replaced by branding based on the new trillium logo, but different government bodies will be able to exhaust their pre-existing brand collateral before adopting the new standard. Revenue-generating government bodies with existing brand identities will be managed on a case-by-case basis.
