Just Point Your Car onto the Open Road and Experience Everything

But where to drive? As Jack Kerouac portrayed in his 1957 novel On the Road, North America stood like an open invitation, its infinity of roads connecting everywhere with everything, to travel, to see, to experience, and to move on.

As kids in 1950s Muskoka, when the post-war economic boom saw most families owning a car and taking to the roads for a vacation, we’d compete during summer’s touring season to see how many different licence plates we could tally: Ohio, New Brunswick, Michigan, New York, Manitoba, Virginia, Illinois, Kentucky, Nova Scotia . . . some summers spotting cars from most every state and province, several boldly framed in plate holders declaring “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death.” Even before checking if the vehicle had come from New Jersey or Indiana, we knew it was from good ol’ USA.

By 2020, much was different. Any kids playing that innocent game of curious observation last summer would have universally seen Ontario’s white and blue licence plates, just occasionally interspersed with a different colour or design, one here from Quebec, another there from B.C. American licence plates were so rare they stood out, mostly attracting unneighbourly responses from those fearful of a spreading virus. Death in the glorious cause of Liberty, perhaps, but not from errant travelers from a chaotic pandemic hotbed south of the border.

Today, on the multi-lane speedway between Muskoka and Toronto, the hundreds of thousands of vehicles flowing hourly in both directions are so uniformly dressed with Ontario plates that you’d think we lived on a single-nation island.

The thing is, there are millions of Ontarians bottled up inside an immense territory offering a diversity of places to go who have found that our own “backyard” is a fascinating place. The Canadian Automobile Association’s highly informative quarterly magazine has, not surprisingly, picked up on this bonanza of regional travel, with lots of helpful tips for Canadians otherwise effectively under house arrest. CAA’s magazine, headlined “Let’s Go!” for Spring 2021, features ways for constrained and travel-challenged folks to “Make this the Year You Give RV’ing a Try.”

For Ontarians this message to travel within our own jurisdiction, because of the rewards it brings everyone, has been present for decades. Our “license to travel” on each registered vehicle’s plate includes an invitation to do so within this endlessly rewarding province. ONTARIO: Yours to Discover. It may be, for a majority of Ontarians who have never seen anything except that slogan on their licence plates, that it’s as unremarkable as overhead sky.

How did we get such a timely, timeless message on provincial licence plates?

After 1971’s provincial election, in which Dalton Camp and Norman Atkins deployed their Big Blue Machine in successful support of Bill Davis’s election as Ontario premier, the Camp advertising agency was designated for the Ontario government’s tourism account. This government advertising was not gratuitous patronage, however. “Whenever one of the government advertising accounts came up,” said Diane Axmith at the Camp agency, “we had to make a competitive presentation alongside other agencies for the business.” But Premier Davis knew who his friends were, and also appreciated the creativity of Camp & Associates.

The speeches Dalton wrote for him – “Cities are for people, not cars,” when he cancelled the intended Spadina Expressway through Toronto’s heartland – had policy punch and pithy phrases that outclassed standard provincial fare. Davis also valued the advertising guru’s creativity, displayed earlier when Camp countered the unconstitutional move by Ontario Premier Robarts’s government to launch overseas trade offices (federal jurisdiction) by pragmatically arguing that Ontarians should “buy locally.” Camp said Ontario’s market economy should be supported by Ontarians in their own self-interest, and persuaded the Conservative government that the biggest market for Ontario goods was also the closest. Millions of Ontarians needed to stop buying the imported products of foreign competitors and start purchasing items made down the street or across town.

Then the Camp agency came up with what party traditionalists considered “an odd kind of advertising” campaign about a hippopotamus. Still rooted in small-town Ontario values, they expected nothing better than a full-page advertisement that commanded consumers to “Buy Ontario!” or “Buy Canadian!” But Camp’s clever campaign, one said in awe, “just took off like you would not believe, with billboards and newspaper advertising.” Camp’s marketing concept was that some things just had to be imported, like a hippo, because Ontario didn’t have any of its own. But apart from exotic things like that, Ontario produced just about everything else and Ontarians should give themselves an economic boost by buying Ontario-made goods. The more prosperous Ontario’s economy, the better it would be for all who lived in the province. Decades later, people who’d been exposed to the hippo campaign would still remember the image and its essential message about buying Ontario-made products.

Creating Stellar Campaigns was Dalton Camp’s Stock in Trade

In the early 1970s, Ontario’s tourism officials were increasingly anxious about losing business to neighbouring New York State which was running its highly successful “I Love New York” campaign. Ontario needed a response. The Camp agency’s research department discovered that when people were shown the province’s travel literature, their eyes popped. The brochures about places and experiences Ontario offered were stunning but, to travelling vacationers, virtually unknown. So Dalton Camp, Norman Atkins, John McIntyre and others at the agency decided on creating a theme to instill an exciting sense of pride, of discovery, and adventure.

They filmed Ontario’s wide variety of unique scenes and linked that imagery to the attractive travel literature, creating a double whammy: engaging television and mass distribution of brochures. Some three million copies of rotogravure inserts were distributed to households across the province. The theme, “very much in character with the province,” said McIntyre, “had a soft-spoken quality.” It was: ONTARIO: Yours to Discover.

The slogan was an invitation. The onus was on individuals and families to make the discovery, which they were free to do. Its simplicity appealed not only to Ontarians and Canadians but Americans, too, as results from Camp agency focus groups in the United States attested. They considered ONTARIO: Yours to Discover “very polite, reflecting Canadian character.” Also, “discovery” spoke to the sense of a different culture and foreign country which is why Americans would come to Canada. “Yours to Discover” held out that promise. The campaign was so positive that the Davis government added the slogan to the province’s licence plates.

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For many more backroom accounts about the stellar campaigns of brothers-in-law Dalton Camp and Norman Atkins, as well as the inside scoop on their political intrigues, see The Big Blue Machine: How Tory Campaign Backrooms Changed Canadian Politics Forever, by J. Patrick Boyer