Visitors driving the roads of the Northwest Territories are guaranteed sightings of many polar bears – not the actual Arctic animals but the iconic polar bear licence plates, which are now coveted by collectors worldwide.
The origins of the plates date back to when the NWT borders stretched westward from Baffin Island in the east to the Mackenzie Mountains in the west, a time when vehicles were a rarer sight than polar bears.
For the first half of the 20th century, there weren’t any highways into the NWT and there were only a few streets to drive on for those that did have a vehicle – which in those days were mainly trucks.
It wasn’t until 1941 that the territorial government required motorists in the NWT to register their vehicles and display licence plates. Those first licence plate designs were rectangular, with simple colour schemes such as orange numbers on a black backdrop and shaped similarly to the standard issues plates that can be found almost everywhere in North America today.
When the Mackenzie Highway was connected to the south around Great Slave Lake in the early 1960s, drivers could access more of the NWT by road, bringing many new vehicles into the territory.
In honour of its centennial in 1970, the government introduced the first version of the now-famous polar bear plate, which was designed by NWT Commissioner Stuart Hodgson – the first appointed leader from Ottawa to reside in the Territory.
The original licence plate features a blue background with white numbering and the first plate issued (‘1’) was given to Hodgson.
The unique shape of the licence plate still makes it stand apart from every other vehicle registration plate around. Back in 1957, auto manufacturers and the governments throughout North America agreed to standardize the shape of these and every vehicle across Canada, the U.S. and Mexico needed a registration plate that was six inches (15cm) in height and 12 inches (30cm) wide with five pre-determined bolt holes – but nowhere did it stipulate it had to be a rectangle.
Other colour combinations and variants soon followed the original white-on-blue-design. The well-known 1973-edition celebrating the centennial of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police featured a yellow border around the bear; the now familiar blue-on-white design with the slogan “Explore Canada’s Arctic” first appeared in 1986.
By the 1980s, motorcyclists in the Northwest Territories also wanted to share in the polar bear licence look and they launched a petition in 1983 asking the territorial government for the right to have polar bear licence plates on their bikes as well.
A member of the NWT legislature tabled their petition in the assembly and this move led to changes which, in 1984, allowed NWT bikers to also put polar-bear shaped plates on their choppers – mini versions of the larger polar bear vehicle plates, measuring only 4 inches (10 cm) by 7 inches (17 cm).
So beloved is the polar bear licence plate in the Northern consciousness that when Nunavut separated from the Northwest Territories in 1999 a minor skirmish erupted over which jurisdiction would keep the iconic design. The NWT had created the plate, but most of the polar bears’ territory ended up in Nunavut after division.
The plate debate eventually gave rise to an annual hockey tournament in Rankin Inlet that is still played to this day, with the original idea being that the winning team – from the NWT or Nunavut – would get to keep the polar bear licence plate.
Ultimately, the licence plate debate came down to copyright. The NWT legally owned the polar bear design, although that was licensed to Nunavut until 2012.
By that time, the tooling dies used to stamp the steel for the licence plate was in need of replacement. The NWT also wanted to make the switch to more environmentally friendly aluminium. So, Nunavut then replaced its polar bear licence plate with new rectangular design featuring colourful images of a polar bear, inuksuk and the Northern Lights. The NWT, meanwhile, updated its licence plate with a simple slogan: ‘Spectacular’.
The polar bear licence plate remains a hot collector’s item. The territorial government has issued several decorative versions in recent years to commemorate historic moments such as the opening of the NWT’s newest roadway – and Canada’s only road to the Arctic Ocean – the Inuvik to Tuktoyaktuk Highway (pictured).
Today, you can find the polar bear licence plate on cars, café walls and in private collections all over the world.
