I would like to share with you dear readers a statement from auto insurance broker SGI Canada on the new licence plates issued to Saskatchewan drivers last year.

"SGI plans to phase in the aluminum licence plates early in 2009, once the current inventory has been used. There is no additional cost to SGI or its customers for moving to a new plate material and a new font."

Ha, those dreary flatlanders! Can't Saskatchewanians think of anything more interesting to put on their licence plates than more wheat symbols? No wonder it didn't cost them any extra money. And is their shame so great that they felt it necessary to phase the licence plates in just a few at a time? Can't flood the Queen's highways with a bunch of lousy plates tourists are bound to hate, can we?

Thank God our NWT licence plates are "spectacular," and are about to become even more so now that the territorial government is making us toss our old ones, and replace them with shiny new emblems of Northern borealis glory. Well, allegedly, as the government hasn't deemed it important enough to show us the actual design yet. Nonetheless, I'm sure the $10 per plate will be worth it, and if it costs an extra $25 to hang onto that "LUV NWT" personalized plate, all the better.

All right, I'm going a little overboard with the facetiousness here, but if you were like me when you received your letter in the mail last week - issued prematurely it appears - you might have thought it was a joke too.

I've had my current NWT plates - one for my truck, the other for my boat trailer - since 2004, and I must say they appear to be standing up against the rigours of time quite admirably. The one on the trailer is a little bit bent but it's nothing a pair of vice grips couldn't fix.

Now, some may say well it's only $10, so suck it up buttercup. But my irritation, and that of others I'm sure, is just a reaction to the usual arbitrariness we've come to expect from the territorial government on many matters great and small. Where is this stuff coming from? Who are these people who dream this stuff up and then foist it upon an unsuspecting territory?

The Deh Cho Bridge is probably an extreme example but it surely applies - another grand plan revealed in dribs and drabs.

Here's a true story from a long time ago when I was still in show business: I was on a mostly regrettable tour with my band, Yellowknife's own Small Town Rhino, and we had been pulled over by the RCMP on the Trans-Canada Highway somewhere outside of Vancouver. The police officer who came to the driver's window of our van was in a very surly mood.

"What the hell kind of licence plate is that?" he asked Marc Lacharite, our drummer and driver 90 per cent of the time.

It took a while to explain but he eventually let us go. I was astonished even then that there were still people, including law enforcement officials, who knew nothing about the Northwest Territories, and our licence plate is the one obvious thing about us that immediately sets us apart. There is no plate like it in the world.

I agree that it's a great promotional tool, but it has also become a powerful totem over the years and is a great source of pride for NWT residents.

So to have a group of bureaucrats monkeying with it with no consultation or input asked from the public seems to be a bit of an insult to me.

Who knows, maybe the new design looks fantastic. Too bad the Department of Transportation's first public move was to demand money to pay for it.

• Mike W. Bryant is assignment editor for Yellowknifer. Contact him at 766-8236 or by e-mail at minder@nnsl.com