The Bike

So, I arrive on the flight with three of my cousins from Scotland, well two from Scotland and one from China, who married a Scottish cousin.

I’d been a bit worried as the guy who I had planned to buy the bike from had suddenly gone radio silent and wasn’t responding to my emails. Without the bike, the trip part of the holiday would fall apart, or I’d end up buying a shed and hoping it made the trip.

Fortunately late on the Friday night Steven got in touch and we arranged he’d bring the bike over on the Saturday morning, just before the wedding for me to have a look at.

It’s a 1985 Honda Magna V45.

Steven still had to get the safety certificate done, and the used vehicle information package that you need to sell a bike in Canada. He also had a wedding that weekend, so it meant I’d be unlikely to get the bike until Monday as the Service Ontario offices where you re-register the ownership were closed on Sunday.

On Monday afternoon I’d arranged to meet Steven at 2pm to pay for the bike, and then I rode it home. At this point I hadn’t insured it as I needed the VIN, so I emailed that off to the Insurance company as soon as I’d gotten it. When we got back with the bike I realised that it didn’t have a number plate, as the plate stays with the owner, not the bike. What should have happened is we met at the office to re-register the title, but no harm was done.

With the bike back in my Uncle’s garage we headed off to the Service Ontario office to finish off the paperwork, but unsure if I needed the insurance details, which I didn’t have yet to complete it. The office itself is much like a DVLA office at home, you take a number and sit and wait. People of all nationalities are lined up waiting to speak to the staff at the counter, who to be fair we very patient and polite despite missing paperwork, poor English and heavy accents.

When my turn came the young lady I’d gotten was a bit surprised to see a UK citizen trying to register a Canadian bike, but a colleague had told her it was ok. The next thing was there was a problem with the bill of sale, which the seller needs to give you as you pay sales tax when you re-register. I hadn’t realised this at first as we don’t do it at home, so there was another 13% added to the sales price, plus the price of the new plate, which is like our road tax. So an extra $434 dollars.

In the end what she told me to do was go outside, write on the extra words and come back in, then grab her attention so I wouldn’t have to wait in the queue again. At this point my Uncle had come back from dropping some stuff off, so out we went, forged the document and came back in. At this point I realised I didn’t have the title document, our version of the V5, which is about the size of a £20 note. I had thought the lady at the counter had kept it, but my Uncle went out to check anyway, and came back saying it wasn’t there.

So the lady waves me up, jumping the queue, and I give over the updated bill of sale. That was now ok, but things soon fell apart, when she asked for the title. I asked if she had kept it, but she said no, which meant it was either hidden somewhere in the document pouch I had with me, or I’d dropped it outside. It wasn’t in the document pouch. Completely against their regulations, she then told me what else to forge on the bill of sale so that I could get a new title if I couldn’t find the original.

We went outside again anyway to look, and wandered up and down searching. A guy standing outside asked if we had lost something. It turned out he’d seen people walking over the title and thought that’s an important document, so he’d picked it up and taken it inside to hand over the counter. We got it back from the office folk, then my Uncle went outside to give the guy $5 so he could have a beer on us.

With all the documents now present and correct the lady calls me up to jump the queue again, leaving everyone else waiting. This sea of people, every colour except white must have wondered what was going on, but no-one said anything.

Finally now we were nearly there until she asked for my insurance details. By another stroke of blinding luck an email had just arrived from my insurance company with the name of the underwriter and policy number. I did mention that the policy didn’t kick in until tomorrow, but she just looked up and said, you didn’t tell me that.

Eventually she handed everything back together with a new number plate “3964R” and I was good to go.