Iconic. Beloved. Unique. Desirable. The holy grail.

Those are just some of the ways collectors describe the Northwest Territories’ polar-bear shaped licence plate.

Steven Silver has been a fan since the plate was first introduced in 1970. The 67-year-old Kingston, Ont., resident said he can still remember the first time he saw one. He was 12 years old.

“I broke away from my mother and I ran down Princess Street three blocks to catch up with this thing, to see what it was,” he recalled. When he saw the plate, he wasn’t disappointed. 

“This thing was just beyond a collector's wildest dreams,” Silver said.

He immediately set his sights on acquiring one of the polar bear plates — not an easy task for a teenager growing up before the internet. But he was eventually able to sign up to buy a used plate from the N.W.T. government.

“It was probably one of my prize possessions for a long time,” Silver said. “It was always sort of the holy grail of licence plates.” 

Collector Sam Bova shares this feeling. He has been exclusively collecting N.W.T. and Nunavut licence plates for more than 30 years, and now has around 1,300 N.W.T. plates in his collection.

Like many collectors, he was drawn to the plates because of their unique shape.

“Twenty or 30 years ago I got my first one, and then, as most collectors will tell you, the addiction kicks in,” he said.

He said an average modern N.W.T. licence plate is worth about $30, but the most rare N.W.T. plates can go for close to $1,000.

The history of the polar-bear plate

The Northwest Territories’ polar bear-shaped licence plate first came out in January 1970, in honour of the territory’s centennial.

Stuart Hodgson, the territory's commissioner at the time, is credited with the idea for the plate, though he likely didn’t design it.

In a News of the North article from Jan. 8, 1970, headlined “Get a polar bear and travel!,” Hodgson is quoted as saying the territory wanted to create a polar bear plate to go with the N.W.T. government’s polar bear logo, which had been introduced a couple years earlier.

Jakes Ootes worked with Hodgson at the time, first as his executive assistant, then at the N.W.T. government’s department of information. 

“[Hodgson] wanted to bring attention to the Northwest Territories. And one way of doing this was the polar bear symbol and the polar bear licence plate,” Ootes said.

The government’s polar bear logo was designed by Helmut Seager, who worked at the high-profile Canadian ad agency Baker Lovick. Ootes believes Baker Lovick was also commissioned to design the licence plate, but CBC News was not able to confirm this.

The polar bear plate became mandatory at the end of March 1970, and almost immediately thefts began.

In a government document from April that year, officials tell the commissioner that a batch of plates destined for what is now the Kivalliq region of Nunavut never arrived, because they were stolen in Inuvik.

Nunavut licence plates

When Nunavut became its own territory in 1999, there was some competition over who would keep the polar bear plate.

The copyright for the plate remained with N.W.T., but both territories ended up keeping the design.

In 2012, Nunavut switched to a rectangular plate featuring a multicolour image of a polar bear under the northern lights.

But this year, the territory unveiled its own unique polar bear design. The bear faces left, instead of right like the N.W.T.’s.

‘The single most iconic licence plate design’

The N.W.T. polar bear plate was a big hit with collectors as soon as it came out in 1970.

The Automobile License Plate Collectors Association (ALPCA) retroactively named it the 1970 plate of the year when they created the award a few years later.

In 2019, ALPCA dedicated a whole special edition of its PLATES magazine to the N.W.T. In one article, writer Eric Tanner calls the polar bear plate “the single most iconic licence plate design in the world.”

American Ethan Craft is a lifelong collector of licence plates. He’s built a career making TikToks and YouTube videos about the hobby.

He said his videos about the polar-bear plates get a warm reaction among collectors and non-collectors alike.

“It’s one of those plates that always sparks curiosity in people,” he said.

“I mean, you think of licence plates all over the world, they differ but at their core they’re all squares, rectangles. There’s really no other plate on earth, with a couple very limited exceptions, that are anything unique like the polar bears.”

He said it’s the reason the N.W.T. plates are still some of the most desirable licence plates in the world.

“No matter what the scope of your collection is, pretty much every licence plate collection on the planet has a polar bear in it.”