The plates were issued, and were unofficially scrapped, but many found their way into the collectors' black market. In 1986, Waldale, a Canadian licence plate manufacturer, due to a production error, produced an entire batch of New Brunswick plates that began with the letters ASS. Jurisdictions' attention to excluding offensive combinations varies widely, however. Thus, numbering sequences generally exclude certain combinations of letters or numbers that would be potentially offensive. The gradual increase in the use of letters in the serials of licence plates has given rise to an increased possibility of unintentional profane or inappropriate words or messages arising from the use of sequential alphanumeric combinations. Plates with C as the first digit are now commonplace as of 2021. In late 2006, plates with B as the first digit were assigned, and have continued from there sequentially. It took close to 10 years to exhaust the supply of plate numbers with A as the first digit.
After Ontario's transition to an ABCD-123 format in 1997, plates were issued in ascending order starting with AAAA-001. In Canada, licence plate numbers are usually assigned in ascending order, beginning with a starting point such as AAA-001.Īs such, someone familiar with the sequence can determine roughly when the licence plate was issued. Main article: Vehicle registration plates of Canada
