36-year driver's licence mixup upending Ottawa man's life

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:

"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. 

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.