# Ontario license bureau/Drive test - sucks



## GuitarsCanada (Dec 30, 2005)

Unreal the chaos and disorganization at these places. 10 people at least "working" there and two on a counter. They say check in a half hour before a drive test, which I did. Took my test and then went back in to get my paperwork processed. Two lines. One for drive test check-in and completed (passed) tests. The other a huge counter with 25 people waiting via a number system and one person on the counter. 

Now I showed up when told, took my test and passed and was in there for 2.5 hours to get the paperwork processed. The chick at the drive check in counter told me to go away when I got up there since she was too busy checking in drivers who were either 5 min before their test time or had not shown up yet. You don't show up on time, get the fuck out...... so I take a number for the other counter. 

I stood by the other chick tapping my feet but she just ignored me and continued to check in drivers that were late showing up and they were lined up out the door. 

Total incompetence and I think these people are paid like $22/hr. Outrageous

I am also amazed at the amount of Asians in there that cannot speak a word of English getting licenses. It's a total joke at these counters. No idea what these people are saying to them and they are trying to test their eyes etc. Brutal


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## mhammer (Nov 30, 2007)

So, um, not a pleasant consumer experience?

In principle, one-stop-shopping counters, like Service Canada and Service Ontario are _supposed to be _more efficient and cost effective. Personally, I'm not always persuaded that bigger is always better OR more efficient or cost effective....as pretty much anyone who lives in a region that was forcibly amalgamated with a larger municipality back in the 90's can tell you.


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## GuitarsCanada (Dec 30, 2005)

mhammer said:


> So, um, not a pleasant consumer experience?
> 
> In principle, one-stop-shopping counters, like Service Canada and Service Ontario are _supposed to be _more efficient and cost effective. Personally, I'm not always persuaded that bigger is always better OR more efficient or cost effective....as pretty much anyone who lives in a region that was forcibly amalgamated with a larger municipality back in the 90's can tell you.


The service center where you get your passport and health cards etc is a breeze compared to this place. You would swear they are trained to make no eye contact and pretend that you are invisible. They will actually take 5 minute breaks to talk to each other before calling another number. They have zero sympathy for the idiots that have to spend 3 hrs in there for a 5 minute process. It's disgraceful and we should be ashamed of ourselves. I got married in Vegas in under an hour that included a limo drive, license bureau and chapel for fuck sake.


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## Jimmy_D (Jul 4, 2009)

mhammer said:


> So, um, not a pleasant consumer experience?
> 
> In principle, one-stop-shopping counters, like Service Canada and Service Ontario are _supposed to be _more efficient and cost effective. Personally, I'm not always persuaded that bigger is always better OR more efficient or cost effective....as pretty much anyone who lives in a region that was forcibly amalgamated with a larger municipality back in the 90's can tell you.


That's hilarious... "supposed to be more efficient" indeed, the format of one-stop shopping is more efficient and cost effective everywhere except at a government office, there that rule doesn't apply because any efficiencies are completely overwhelmed by the general incompetence of the ontario civil service.


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## cheezyridr (Jun 8, 2009)

i shouldn't feel symathy for none of you guys, but those fuckers made me start from scratch with a G-1. i told the manager of the dmv i had been driving longer than she had been alive. it was the truth. you guys are the ones who privatized your dmv. reap what you've sown. call it tough love, but maybe if enough of you get pissed off, you'll stop privatizing govt services, especially to foreign companies.


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## Noise Supply (May 31, 2013)

It's been a while since I've had to use the Ontario licensing system, I don't remember having that much trouble though. The biggest place I used a licensing office was in Sudbury though - maybe they're busier where you are.

It may not work now that Alberta changed their licensing to graduated, but here was a fun trick that could have been used back in the day: 
1) Pass your G1 written test in Ontario and get your photo ID.
2) Wait one year. 
3) Move to Alberta. 
4) Trade in your G1 and receive a full class 5 license...
5) WHAT!? Seriously! DONE!

I had a G2 when I moved to Alberta, and they gave me a class 5. They explained it to me that if you are "in the licensing system" with whatever level of license for 1 year, they gave you the full Alberta license for that class of license. My sister almost did the same thing with her G1 when she moved to Alberta, they told her she was like 2 or 3 months short, since her G1 was issued in less than a year from when she moved! Burned. But like I said, it probably doesn't work anymore anyway, now that Alberta has its own graduated license system.

Similarly, being down here in Virginia till next spring, I'm thinking of getting my motorcycle license down here, because it seems easy/fast:
1) Go to a college motorcycle course for a Friday night, as well as all day Saturday and Sunday.
2) Show your certificate to the DMV
3) Receive full motorcycle license.

On another tangent, any Registry or Licensing Office in Canada has nothing on the DMV in the US. Every pop-culture reference to the gong-show that is the DMV is absolutely true. I wouldn't wish that experience on anyone. It's a very foreign, chaotic, and unfriendly experience - and the people working there seem passively aggressive, bitter, and clueless.

In Canada we think we have a lot of red tape, hassle, and bureaucracy, but we actually don't in comparison. It's a great place to live, even when sometimes it may not feel like it, Canadians are lucky. Only thing we don't have going for Canada is the winters in a lot of areas of the country.


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## Jim DaddyO (Mar 20, 2009)

By what I see on the roads, the bar is not set too high to get your drivers license anymore. They may as well make it a prize in a box of Cracker Jacks. Then there is parking....oh, don't get me started on that one...


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## Jimmy_D (Jul 4, 2009)

cheezyridr said:


> i shouldn't feel symathy for none of you guys, but those fuckers made me start from scratch with a G-1. i told the manager of the dmv i had been driving longer than she had been alive. it was the truth. you guys are the ones who privatized your dmv. reap what you've sown. call it tough love, but maybe if enough of you get pissed off, you'll stop privatizing govt services, especially to foreign companies.


When did we privatize the Ministry of Transport... I missed that somehow.


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## Noise Supply (May 31, 2013)

Jimmy_D said:


> When did we privatize the Ministry of Transport... I missed that somehow.


I was about to ask the same thing. I know Alberta Registries are privatized (just like their alcohol), but I thought Ontario was still all provincially run. If anything I thought they'd privatize the LCBO before the MTO.


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## Guitar101 (Jan 19, 2011)

Jimmy_D said:


> When did we privatize the Ministry of Transport... I missed that somehow.


My guess is that we didn't privatize the MOT but I'm only going by the terrible service that they provide their customers. They must still be government run or their service would be better, wouldn't it?


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## Diablo (Dec 20, 2007)

cheezyridr said:


> i shouldn't feel symathy for none of you guys, but those fuckers made me start from scratch with a G-1. i told the manager of the dmv i had been driving longer than she had been alive. it was the truth. you guys are the ones who privatized your dmv. reap what you've sown. call it tough love, but maybe if enough of you get pissed off, you'll stop privatizing govt services, especially to foreign companies.


What on earth are you talking about?


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## Intrepid (Oct 9, 2008)

The Ministry of Transportation in Ontario is NOT privatized. It is run by the Province of Ontario. That's why service may be slow.


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## urko99 (Mar 30, 2009)

GuitarsCanada said:


> The service center where you get your passport and health cards etc is a breeze compared to this place. You would swear they are trained to make no eye contact and pretend that you are invisible. They will actually take 5 minute breaks to talk to each other before calling another number. They have zero sympathy for the idiots that have to spend 3 hrs in there for a 5 minute process. It's disgraceful and we should be ashamed of ourselves. I got married in Vegas in under an hour that included a limo drive, license bureau and chapel for fuck sake.


Too late now, but a cell phone video with commentating may have sped things up. So sorry for your bad experience.


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## GuitarsCanada (Dec 30, 2005)

urko99 said:


> Too late now, but a cell phone video with commentating may have sped things up. So sorry for your bad experience.


It's a sad experience when everyone in there is ready to throttle someone. The whole atmosphere is terrible


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## Jimmy_D (Jul 4, 2009)

Ask yourself what's gone wrong here in Ontario since the 70's when I wrote the 365 test at Bay and Wellesley in the morning and then got straight onto the TTC out to Warden and Eglinton to book my road test (for 10 days later), and then took the bus back home for early afternoon, both done in a day and no issues or bs to speak of, btw 10 days later I had my full license and another 30 days later my bike license.


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## Diablo (Dec 20, 2007)

GuitarsCanada said:


> The service center where you get your passport and health cards etc is a breeze compared to this place. You would swear they are trained to make no eye contact and pretend that you are invisible. They will actually take 5 minute breaks to talk to each other before calling another number. They have zero sympathy for the idiots that have to spend 3 hrs in there for a 5 minute process. It's disgraceful and we should be ashamed of ourselves. I got married in Vegas in under an hour that included a limo drive, license bureau and chapel for fuck sake.


Haha

one of the perks of living in "the middle of nowhere" (according to my 416 friends) is, our passport office is empty.
literally. Went to renew mine, and a few months later, my daughters, and on both occasions you could hear a pin drop there. They only have about 3-4 ppl working there, but the "lineup" is never more than 1-2 ppl long. The library is far busier and noisier. Couldn't say the same for the office in Mississauga, where the "take a number" tickets run into the high triple digits.


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## mhammer (Nov 30, 2007)

Passport offices vary in the amount of traffic. Not just by location, but by day and time, within the same office. When I went to get my first passport, 5 years ago, just after the USA declared you needed a passport to do a bit of cross-border grocery shopping at border towns, there was a HUGE demand placed on Passport Canada (then an agency within Foreign Affairs, now an agency under Citizenship and Immigration), and they hired a small army of folks, setting up 2 or 3 shifts of workers to process passport requests.

When I arrived at the office, in downtown Ottawa, a mere block from Parliament Hill, I expected to wait for hours. But at 8:30AM on a Monday morning I _*was *_the lineup. As you may be aware, the procedure involves an initial officer who checks your materials to make sure you have everything you need, and issues you a ticket, so you can wait for them to call your number and show which wicket to go to. I was still gathering my papers/forms at that first desk when my number showed up on the display. I hastily grabbed everything in a heap, ran over to the wicket, and said to the woman there "I never thought I'd ever be saying this at a passport office, but sorry to keep _*you*_ waiting!". She smiled and took it in the spirit with which it was offered.


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## Guest (Sep 17, 2014)

Want to hear about what it's like in a state with 30 million people in it? I kind of miss the relative calm of Ontario's DMV offices! 

For my CA drivers test I sat, in my car, in a line of cars, drive-through style, for a good 3 hours before I got up to the "test window" where an instructor jumped in a did my in car with me. Glad I filled up the tank before I got in the line up! And time to take the written test, get the picture taken, eye exam, etc. -- another 8 hours or so of queuing and waiting on top of that.

Government service centers are fantastically interesting case studies in queuing theory. With all kinds of weird, special queue systems to solve the problems.

At the IRS office a few months ago they had a multi-ticket system. You queued in a long line outside the building to get to a single person on the inside who would ask you what you where there for. Once you answered some questions, she'd print off a letter+number ticket and you'd go sit in an interior waiting area. The interesting thing about this system was there were four queues of tickets on the leader board and the next ticket called wasn't sequential. I could have A10, the board could be on A9 for the A queue and it could jump to A15 or go back to A1 because IRS officers were seeing people, dealing with stuff, and then sending them back out to wait while they worked and then calling them back in to their cubicle.

IT WAS MADDENING.

But interesting, academically, at the same time. There are whole tomes on queuing theory. You wouldn't believe how well-studied the whole "why are streetcars always bunched up" problem is. Very well studied.


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## Steadfastly (Nov 14, 2008)

So, did you go at lunch time or on a Saturday? It's best to go in the off hours.....10:30-11:30 a.m. -- 2:00-3:30 p.m. I have always found this the best time and not Fridays or Saturdays or near the end of the month.


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## bolero (Oct 11, 2006)

I agree it can be maddening


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## JeremyP (Jan 10, 2012)

Diablo said:


> Haha
> 
> one of the perks of living in "the middle of nowhere" (according to my 416 friends) is, our passport office is empty.
> literally. Went to renew mine, and a few months later, my daughters, and on both occasions you could hear a pin drop there. They only have about 3-4 ppl working there, but the "lineup" is never more than 1-2 ppl long. The library is far busier and noisier. Couldn't say the same for the office in Mississauga, where the "take a number" tickets run into the high triple digits.



Haha, Same here, I live in the boondocks and I was in the closest licence office (Tillsonburg Ontario) last week. I was in and out in five minutes and the lady was really pleasant . She even helped me order a new health card while I was there. 

Should mention as well, I took my son to Kitchener passport office to get his passport. The place was swamped and pretty crowded, but considering the sheer amount of people we got up pretty quick (25min). Also I had gotten wrong birth certificate (needed long form lol) and I had to come back . The teller was MEGA helpful and he also gave me a yellow form that allowed me to bypass the line and go straight to him when we came back. The whole experience was not unpleasant .


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## guitarman2 (Aug 25, 2006)

Noise Supply said:


> It's been a while since I've had to use the Ontario licensing system, I don't remember having that much trouble though. The biggest place I used a licensing office was in Sudbury though - maybe they're busier where you are.


I'm in Brantford and have no issues either.


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## davetcan (Feb 27, 2006)

I suspect the other 6 or 8 people behind the counter, traditionally appearing to do nothing, are actually making calls on behalf of duct cleaning companies.


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## Moosehead (Jan 6, 2011)

The new Niagara office on Thorold stoner rd. isn't bad, last time i was in there she renewed my health card at the same time for me. The Bunting rd office in st. kitts is horrible. I guessing you were at Bunting rd location.


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## Rick31797 (Apr 20, 2007)

HE may have forgot to re-new his licence , and had to start over again... my wife had been driving for over 30 yrs, and didn't get a notice to re-new, never thought anything about , tell one night sitting there decided to look at her licence, been expired for 2 yrs..lol had to start all over again.... 





Diablo said:


> What on earth are you talking about?


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## cheezyridr (Jun 8, 2009)

yes, essentially, that is what happened. if your license isn't valid for 2 of the last 3 yrs, you start from scratch. i was under the impression that those folks at the service canada kiosks in different stores were working for some company contracted to ontario.
if that's not the case, then ok, one less sucky thing from a thing that sucks. your dmv is not privately run? either way, graduated licensing is stupid, and only good for insurance companies. the foks who work in the dmv in the states are bad in their own way too, don't get me wrong. but it's a heck of alot easier to get a license there


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## bagpipe (Sep 19, 2006)

Intrepid said:


> The Ministry of Transportation in Ontario is NOT privatized. It is run by the Province of Ontario. That's why service may be slow.


This is the crowd that the OP is talking about: DriveTest Ontario. Heres a blurb from their website:

[FONT=&amp]"Serco DES operating as DriveTest, is a private company licenced by the Ministry of [FONT=&amp]Transportation of Ont[/FONT][FONT=&amp]ario since [FONT=&amp]September 2, 2003 to operate 56 Driver Examination Centres and [/FONT][FONT=&amp]39 Travel Points spread across Ontario."

They're not in operation everywhere in Ontario but I encountered them at Arnprior (a fairly small town) and Ottawa itself. Heres the website:

http://www.drivetest.ca/EN/Pages/default.aspx
[/FONT][/FONT][/FONT]


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## ed2000 (Feb 16, 2007)

Last year I wrote my AZ renewal test at one of these 3 ring circuses. A group of South Asians were taken into a separate area and given a verbal test in their native language. Kinda makes sense as to why there is such s***ty driving skills displayed by many drivers.


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## Rick31797 (Apr 20, 2007)

The only break they give you when an experience driver needs to start over is, you don't have to wait a full year from your G2 to your G licence.




cheezyridr said:


> yes, essentially, that is what happened. if your license isn't valid for 2 of the last 3 yrs, you start from scratch. i was under the impression that those folks at the service canada kiosks in different stores were working for some company contracted to ontario.
> if that's not the case, then ok, one less sucky thing from a thing that sucks. your dmv is not privately run? either way, graduated licensing is stupid, and only good for insurance companies. the foks who work in the dmv in the states are bad in their own way too, don't get me wrong. but it's a heck of alot easier to get a license there


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## GuitarsCanada (Dec 30, 2005)

Moosehead said:


> The new Niagara office on Thorold stoner rd. isn't bad, last time i was in there she renewed my health card at the same time for me. The Bunting rd office in st. kitts is horrible. I guessing you were at Bunting rd location.


There are two separate service centers. There are the ones that you go to for your passport, health card etc. Then there are these vehicle licence and drive test centers. I have had reasonable success at the passport offices. There is one at the Pen Center and service is usually fairly quick and efficient. This drive test center on Bunting is a total joke and a bad one to boot


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