Mario Iamundo sold a 2002 Honda CR-V in 2011. Somewhere between then and this summer, that CR-V ended up on the hook of a tow truck and parked in a storage yard in Etobicoke. The bill for the tow and the storage — $1,130 — went to him.
Not to the guy who bought it. Not to whoever was driving it when it got hooked. To the man whose name was still sitting on the top line of the vehicle’s registration history at the Ministry of Transportation, fifteen years and roughly one full generation of Honda product cycles later.
“I don’t think that’s quite fair,” Iamundo said. He paid it anyway.
Here is the uncomfortable part for anyone in Ontario who has ever sold a car in a parking lot for cash: the system worked exactly as designed.
Ontario asks the buyer to do all the work
Ontario runs a plate-to-owner registration system. Your plates belong to you, not to the car. When you sell privately, the province’s official seller checklist tells you to hand over the vehicle portion of the green permit, a signed bill of sale, and a Used Vehicle Information Package, then keep your plates and the plate portion for yourself.
Read that list again and notice what is not on it. There is no step where the seller tells the ministry anything. No notice of sale. No form. No confirmation email. The seller’s transaction ends the moment the buyer drives off with somebody else’s plates or a flatbed.
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The obligation to close the loop sits entirely with the buyer, who has six days under the Highway Traffic Act to register the vehicle in their own name. If they don’t, nothing automatic happens. No letter goes out. The registry simply keeps showing the last name that was properly recorded, and it will keep showing it in 2041 if nobody ever fixes it.
So when a storage yard runs a VIN and asks who owns this thing, the province answers honestly. It just answers with a fifteen-year-old fact.
The bill was real. The obligation to pay it probably wasn’t.
Here’s the mechanical detail worth understanding, because it flips the story.
A tow yard’s leverage comes from Ontario’s storage lien law. That lien attaches to the vehicle. It is not a personal debt owed by whoever’s name appears in a database. The storer’s remedy for non-payment is possession and, eventually, sale of the car — not a collections file against a stranger who never signed a consent-to-tow form and hasn’t touched the vehicle since Stephen Harper was prime minister.
The registered owner does get pulled into the process, but as a person entitled to notice, so they have a chance to redeem the car or object before it’s sold. Notice is a right, not an invoice.
There’s a second detail that should have been checked before any money changed hands. The province is blunt about it: if the storage lot doesn’t notify you within 15 days of receiving your vehicle, what you owe is capped at the cost of towing and storing it for that period. Fifteen days of storage on a 24-year-old compact SUV is not $1,130 in most of the GTA. Operators also can’t exceed their own filed maximum rates, and those rates are public — anyone can look up a certificate holder’s numbers on the ministry’s rates portal before paying a cent.
Since January 1, 2024, the whole sector has been under the provincial towing law rather than a patchwork of municipal bylaws, with a certification regime and a code of conduct attached. Complaints about anything from that date forward go to the ministry’s complaint portal. A tow in mid-2026 is comfortably inside that window. If the amount had gone the other way, Small Claims Court now hears matters up to $50,000, raised from $35,000 by O. Reg. 42/25.
The $1,130 is the least frightening number in this story
Fixate on the storage bill and you’ll miss the real exposure.
Section 192(2) of the Highway Traffic Act makes the owner of a vehicle liable for damage caused by negligent operation of that vehicle on a highway, unless it was in someone else’s possession without the owner’s consent. Ontario courts have read that provision generously in favour of injured plaintiffs, and consent to possession is what matters, not consent to any particular drive.
Now stack that on a car the registry still says is yours, driven for a decade and a half by people you’ve never met. A collision claim, a red-light camera bill, a 407 toll account, a plate seized in a criminal investigation — all of it starts by asking the same database the same question and getting your name back. A four-figure storage invoice is a paper cut compared to being named in a personal injury action over a vehicle you sold before the current Civic generation existed.
Why the paperwork gets skipped on purpose
Not every unregistered transfer is a buyer being lazy. Ontario has an entire underground trade built on leaving the seller’s name in place. Curbsiders — unlicensed sellers posing as private individuals — flip cars for profit while dodging registration entirely, because a transfer creates a paper trail, a tax bill, and a disclosure obligation. OMVIC, the province’s sales regulator, says its 2025 enforcement work produced 895 charges against 174 alleged curbsiders and more than $1.9 million in fines under the Provincial Offences Act.
If the person who bought that CR-V was flipping it, never registering it was the entire point.
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Quebec closed this gap years ago by refusing to let one party act alone: the SAAQ’s own instructions require both buyer and seller to complete the transfer, in person or through linked online accounts, and the agency explicitly warns sellers not to let the buyer leave until the transfer is accepted. Ontario asks for none of that.
What to actually do
Sellers, spend twenty dollars and ten minutes. Photograph the buyer’s driver’s licence next to the signed transfer section. Keep your copy of the bill of sale permanently, not for a year. Pull the plates before the car moves. Tell your insurer the same day. Then, three or four weeks later, order a $20 UVIP on the VIN. It lists the vehicle’s full Ontario registration history including present and previous owners, which means it will tell you in plain text whether the transfer actually happened. If your name is still on top, you now know it early, while you still have contact information for the buyer and a live paper trail. Twenty dollars a decade is cheap insurance against a $1,130 surprise, or a much worse one.
Buyers: six days. Registering the car is not a favour to the seller. It’s your legal obligation, and skipping it is an offence under the Highway Traffic Act.
Iamundo’s take, after paying a bill for a car he last saw when it was nine years old, is that there should be more protection for sellers. He’s right that the province has built a one-sided system. Until it becomes two-sided, the protection has to be a habit rather than a policy.
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