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We have that here in Manitoba, it's called Manitoba Public Insurance, but everyone just calls it Autopac. If you want a passenger car, light truck, motorcycle, recreational vehicle (quad, snowmobile, dirtbike, etc) to be able to drive on or across public roadways, you need a plate and insurance. They're the only providers, through a province-wide network of participating private insurance brokers. I think Saskatchewan and BC have it too.

They are regulated by the Public Utilities Board and are sometimes forced to pay money back if they collected too much. This happened a couple times in the last few years. The rates are reasonable and the insurance rate isn't tied to your driving record, age, gender, marital status, annual income, number of offspring, etc. Instead, your driving record affects the annual cost of your driver's license... yes annual. It's so bloody stupid, but that's how it is. If you have an at fault accident, you get a one-time $200 surcharge when you renew your license. A second one in 3 years, you're given a $400 charge and so on, up to a max of $1,200. They give discounts for good driving too, up to a max of 25% off your car insurance and $5 for every merit point off the cost of your license, up to a max of $25. Accidents where you're not at fault naturally don't tack on a charge, nor do accidents with wildlife (deer, elk, moose, bears, rabbits, etc). For some reason farm animals or house pets are magically the driver's fault. Government safeties are also regulated (I think they're $45) but that leads to issues, because shops don't want to spend more than $45 worth of time looking at a car, and nowadays that's less than half an hour at most places.

They also implemented this dumb system called No Fault Insurance. That means you can't sue other drivers, no matter what. A couple years ago a drunk off-duty cop was driving home at like 7:30 am from an end of shift party at a colleague's house and rear ended a woman waiting at a light and killed her. The inquest finished up recently and the poor woman's family is now suing the police, the province, the prosecutor, everybody they can, except the cop who did it. They aren't legally able to. It's very sad because he deserves it. The reason they prevent you from suing, is that they will pay death and other benefits to the family or survivors of a wreck, supposedly equivalent to what you'd get by suing. So instead of tying up the courts, they pay you off. I still don't like it, but I guess the upside is that if you get smoked by a penniless drunk with nothing to his name, you still get something. Otherwise you're stuck trying to extract blood from a stone.

They aren't all evil though. Winnipeg being the car theft capital of Canada, they have a big list of cars every year that require an approved immobilizer, which to date hasn't been defeated by any thieves. Cars made after September 2007 have factory ones that are supposedly good enough. Also any car that is stolen requires an immobilizer, regardless of whether or not it's on the list. This proactive approach keeps our insurance costs down. They also have successfully sued chronic car thieves for damages to recuperate the costs of repairing the damage they caused. They also let you get your car fixed at the shop of your choice. They don't decide for you. They do have a blacklist though, but there's only 2 shops on there if I remember correctly.

But yeah, that's the reality of public insurance and government regulation. It's not all magic, ponies and rainbows but we do seem to have among to lowest rates in the country, and coverage is 100%, unless you're demonstrably under the influence, then it's VOID, as it should be. At least I don't have to add people's names to my car's insurance, they can just drive it, with my permission of course, 100% fully covered, as long as they have a valid driver's license from a long list of countries/jurisdictions (International Permit required for some places).

My province, Manitoba, has just come up with these ID cards that will let you cross US land & sea borders. They're apparently credit card sized, but a bit thicker, and work on RFID. Supposedly the RFID chip only contains a unique identifier. If that's the case, an attacker would have to have physical access to your card to clone it, because the unique identifier would do nothing.

The province includes a protective sleeve which must be removed to be read by RFID readers at the border crossings. Even the envelope they mail it to you in has RFID protection. Obviously their consultations yielded a bunch of people who were concerned about this, not to mention the Privacy act and other considerations.

These are only for people without passports, and are not valid for air travel, or entry into any country other than the US.

Just watch out for Manitoba. The day/month of birth is on the license plates of the vehicle owners. Actually, + 4 months - 1 day. That is the expiry of driver licenses, and Manitoba Public Insurance and the provincial government had a great idea of syncronizing vehicle issurance renewals with the driver licenses (it saves time!). But, they forgot that

    birth_date on license plate

which I think they know is wrong, is about that the same as

    birth_date + 4 months - 1 day on license plates

first, I was told that "computers would get confused by randomized dates" and that "randomized dates are not even distributions" to later "it is the law to renew then".

source: http://mpi.mb.ca/english/insurance/i_faq.html

search for "anniversary day"

Please. Get the facts instead of "searching Google"

http://www.mpi.mb.ca/english/dr_licensing/DriverLicensing.html

"The Driver's Licence Certificate (Part 2) is renewed yearly and expires four months less one day after your birthdate."

Which is OK except they harmonized renewal of licenses and vehicle registration plates. So, effectively, you have birth day/month on license plates.

http://www.mpi.mb.ca/english/insurance/i_faq.html

Q. How do I know when my next time payment is due?
A: [snip] Your anniversary day is the day 4 months after your birthday.

Please. Get the facts instead of "searching Google"

http://www.mpi.mb.ca/english/dr_licensing/DriverLicensing.html

"The Driver's Licence Certificate (Part 2) is renewed yearly and expires four months less one day after your birthdate."

Which is OK except they harmonized renewal of licenses and vehicle registration plates. So, effectively, you have birth day/month on license plates.

http://www.mpi.mb.ca/english/insurance/i_faq.html

Q. How do I know when my next time payment is due?
A: [snip] Your anniversary day is the day 4 months after your birthday.

OK, let's get some details straight here (Winnipeger here), this has been in the works for a couple of years, with a few really important factors guiding the process.

1. All Manitoba drivers are insured by Manitoba Public Insurance (MPI), which are a not-for-profit government-run insurance company.
2. Winnipeg has had a very high rate of auto-theft over the last decade or more. With everyone covered by public insurance, this kind of becomes a political issue.
3. The primary cause of this theft problem is "joy-riding". There may be gangs stealing cars in Winnipeg, but this is really not the primary concern, nor is it the public view. The problem consists of lots of joy-riding, most of the stolen cars are found, they just have $1500-2000 worth of damage between steering column and lights and labour (and some minor body) damage.
4. The article fails to mention the MPI deal. They cover half of the installation cost of an immobilizer provided by one of two companies. This costs ~$110 on older cars (had it on a '95 Caravan) and they'll even book the thing for you (so they can spread the work around). Once it's installed they give you ~$50/year off the insurance on that vehicle (public insurance insures the vehicle for collision, not the driver).

So the basic goal here is to slow down the joy-riding. They anti-theft devices they are installing require both the car key AND the little key fob. Contrary to some espoused opinions, they do indeed go through the process of re-wiring the starter through the device and they specifically install a red blinking light on the dashboard as a "hey-we're-protected" marker.

Yeah it doesn't stop the "steal they key" method, but that wasn't the problem. It doesn't stop the computer + hot-wire method, but that wasn't the problem either. It doesn't stop people from smashing and grabbing stuff, but hey, that wasn't the problem either. The goal is to make it more difficult to steal cars and it's going to work.

Now as to the whole "public" insurance thing, it has some serious benefits. Accidents are resolved quickly and everyone involved is taken care of (it's a government responsibility), young drivers with clean records are not charged 4 times as much for their insurance, average rates are lower b/c any "profits" are re-invested. Of course, the best drivers don't get rates as low as they could with private companies. It's trade-off, but it does let things like this immobilizer requirement actually happen.

Don't make it mandatory(*). Just make it so expensive to insure your vehicle without one that the hold-outs will cave.

(*) What else would you expect in a province where you have only one legal option for auto-insurance. The crown "insurance" corporation (MPI).

Several (but not all) Canadian provinces have mandatory public auto insurances. It's a government monopoly.

A few people in Alberta, which has a private system, actually try to (illegally) take out insurance by claiming they live in Saskatchewan, which has a public system and lower rates. Of course, they get the lower rates by limiting your right to sue if you get involved in an accident. It is also, arguably, more efficient.

More information about Manitoba Public Insurance.

"charging the fewer high risk customers more they can charge the rest of their customers less" "This is a text-book example of how free markets can accomplish good things."

But is it actually cheaper or not? Do they actually charge the rest of their customers less?

After all another poster said: "You might think so, but Manitoba has one of the lowest overall insurance rates in the whole country"

To be fair we will have to factor in any public money the Government puts in or takes out from the insurance scheme. But it seems that Manitoba is doing OK:

http://www.mpi.mb.ca/English/newsroom/articles/200 7/nr_PUB_Highlights.html

Quote: "Manitoba Public Insurance reported net income from annual operations of $68.4 million, thanks to a strong economy and investment revenue. This was reduced to $8.7 million after the corporation provided customers with a $59.7 million premium rebate."

How many private insurance companies are going to do that? The CxO's will get multi million dollar bonuses and say it's their right after all they did a good job.

In my opinion, "the free market" is quite overrated. I'm not against it of course, just too many people seem to blindly worship it or something. They forget it's _their_ job to be the "Invisible Hand". If you have good people in charge, even a crappy system can work ok.

Here's my light bulb joke for you:

Q: How many free market economists does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: Free market economists don't change lightbulbs, they prefer to write their papers in the darkness while waiting for Adam Smith's invisible hand to do it for them

Anyone out there familiar enough with the systems involved to describe exactly what they're trying to mandate?

Most new cars I've bought in the past 8 years or so have had systems that prevent the engine from starting if the car doesn't handshake with a microchip in the ignition key shank. (However, contrary to what some people apparently believe, they don't make the cars impossible to steal, of course.) Is this what they're talking about? I can't imagine it would be easy to retrofit one on a car that doesn't have one already, since it's a pretty integral part of the ignition system and ECU.

According to this page, there are only a few immobilizers that pass some sort of Canadian standard, but I couldn't get any information on how they work by Googling them, and they don't seem to be widespread outside of Canada. (Or actually outside the province of Manitoba at all.) The small number of approved designs combined with making them very widespread via compulsory installation seems like a recipe for disaster: if the thieves are already getting past the safeguards built into modern cars from the factory, they're not stupid; I expect it won't be long before how to bypass them becomes common knowledge. [1]

I think this is the web site of one manufacturer of approved devices, Autowatch. Basically they look like some sort of key-fob RF transponder that communicates either automatically or on-command with a receiver in the car that immobilizes it. Seems like there's a variety of attack vectors there, from just routing around the disablement device in the car, to faking the code (easy if it's a rolling-code system, harder if it's a public-key handshake). Ups the ante a little bit, and it might make thieves target older cars instead of newer ones (which doesn't strike me as an exactly socially useful outcome) or push them to neighboring provinces, but I'm pretty skeptical that it'll have much of a substantial long-term effect on crime.

[1] If I were living there I'd also be immediately and deeply suspicious of any government mandate that requires the purchase of a device from a for-profit corporation, particularly when it only gives you the choice of three corporations, and one corporation makes 3/5 approved models. Seems like a recipe for corruption to me. But then again, I don't trust government further than I can throw it. (And an insurance company run by the government? Nightmare.)

"10 and 2" is no longer suggested, if you have a steering-wheel airbag. "9 and 3" or "8 and 4" is the new consensus, to avoid injury to your arms and help you maintain control of the vehicle if necessary after the airbag deploys. I prefer 8 and 4 because it lets me do the most turning without having to reposition both hands, and it's just more comfortable if the wheel has the right hand-holds there.

(See for example http://www.mpi.mb.ca/english/dr_tips/handposition. html or http://www.dmv.ca.gov/about/senior/safety/driver.h tm)