UPDATE: Brown heard from the Ministry of Transportation on Thursday afternoon that he can start using his licence again.
It started as a curious anomaly. Now it’s putting a serious crimp in his lifestyle.
When Ottawa resident Kevin Brown applied in 1988 for his Ontario driver’s licence, the Ministry of Transportation (MTO) clerk told him there was another Kevin Brown in the province with the same birthdate, whose licence had been suspended two years earlier.
Nothing more came of it — not then, anyway.
Over the next three decades, however, the other Kevin Brown kept turning up like a bad penny, including:
- In 1990 when Brown (our Brown) renewed his licence.
- In 2003 when police ran his plates and mixed him up with the other guy.
- And again this past spring when Brown’s car broke down on Highway 417 and the assisting OPP officer told him there were two files under his name — including the Kevin Brown with a suspended licence.
“The other person supposedly lives in a town I’ve never visited, even to pass through, but apparently I’m supposed to be that person,” Brown said.
Every time it’s happened, he’s had to explain he’s not the “putative” Kevin Brown living northwest of Toronto. “We don’t know if this individual actually exists,” he said.
Rather, he’s 63-year-old Kevin Bede Brown: Nepean resident, longtime federal public servant — and increasingly inconvenienced figure in a Kafkaesque bureaucratic quagmire he blames on bad data entry at MTO.
No end in sight
In a letter dated June 7, the ministry told Brown it had learned he had more than one driving record, so it was merging the records and suspending his licence.
“So my life is rendered a kind of shambles,” he said.
Brown works near Gloucester Centre, a drive that usually takes half an hour. Now he has to take the LRT.
Because half of the Confederation Line is out of commission until July 28, that means taking an R1 bus for part of the trip, so he’s sometimes spending over two hours to reach his office, all while continuing to pay for his parking spot.
To add to Brown’s frustration, some of the communication from MTO after receiving the letter has left a lot to be desired, he said.
He’s particularly concerned with the lack of a timeline for getting him back behind the wheel — and because the ministry hasn’t given him a reference number for efficiency’s sake, instead asking him repeatedly for his personal information.
As a federal public servant, “I am naturally very sensitive to such issues,” he said.
On Wednesday, after he’d reached out to CBC News, Brown said he’d received a call from a senior issues adviser at MTO, though the situation appeared to remain unresolved. It was the first he’d heard from anyone at the ministry since a July 8 email, he said, though he did learn another potential clue: The other Kevin Brown has the same middle initial.
The ministry declined to be interviewed, saying via email on Tuesday that its staff would work directly with Brown as it was not MTO policy’s to discuss the specifics of individual cases with media — even though Brown had provided a letter authorizing the ministry to do so.
Brown said he also reached out to MPP Lisa MacLeod’s office for help, but found the response “feckless.”
“We do not discuss constituents issues,” a staffer at McLeod’s constituency office replied via email when asked to comment.
Missing family dinners
Brown is a grandfather and most of his family lives outside Ottawa, so not being able to drive has affected more than just his work life.
Brown’s daughter Hilary said she misses having her father over for dinners and sending him home with leftovers. She added he’s also a dependable cat-sitter, so she’s had to shorten her own vacation time.
She said it’s absurd an apparent administrative error has dragged on this long.
“They haven’t attempted to verify his actual health status to prove he’s unfit to drive,” Hilary said via email. “He just got a brand-new car that’s sitting unused in the driveway.”
Brown, meanwhile, is taking a philosophical view.
“It’s what you make of it,” he said outside the Blair LRT station on Tuesday, his bulky “intellectual burden” tote bag hanging from his left side.
“[Albert] Camus would have said, ‘Revolt!’ And even Nietzsche would have said it’s what you make of it. What I make of it is: typical bureaucratic messes.”
On the other hand, his step count is way up.
“I just end up doing more walking than I would normally do recreationally,” Brown said.