How to Make Newfoundland Screech.

"Any sufficiently advanced bureaucracy is indistinguishable from molasses." Author Unknown

There is a link between Newfoundland and molasses, and I'm not just talking about the screech.
I spent last week sorting out insurance. Auto insurance it seems is not automatically transferable between provinces, and my underwriter does not insure vehicles in Newfoundland. My broker in Nova Scotia is also not licenced to find insurance here, leaving me to do everything myself. This is why they call Insurance a service industry. Finding insurance in Newfoundland is not really the problem. There are lots of brokers in St John's and some of them even return a phone message shunted through the Automated Press One For English telephone system. Well, one did. Eventually.
And that is when I learned that auto insurance in Newfoundland is roughly double the price in Nova Scotia. I asked the woman on the phone if it was because there were more moose to hit here. She didn't see the humour.
It gets worse. At home, all our insurance needs were covered by one company, and for that we apparently got a discount. But because we could no longer insure our car and truck with them, they refused to continue covering our motorcycles. Well, we left them in Nova Scotia so we are not riding them anyway, but we could not insure them as property sitting in storage either. Something about them having a Registration, so a lawnmower and a snowblower are OK but... For those of you who don't know, it can sometimes be a little tricky to find insurance for motorcycles and I anticipate this being a bit of a headache when we go home.
It gets worse. To get vehicle insurance in a province, the vehicle must be registered in that province. I didn't know this. We weren't going to bother to change our registration, but apparently if you are living in Newfoundland for more that 90 days it is required anyway. To get a vehicle registered in Newfoundland, you must have a Newfoundland driver's licence.
You are starting to understand the molasses comment aren't you?
On Monday, we spent 2 hours at the DMV doing the paperwork. We had to appear in person because there is no online form for provincial transfer and we needed new pictures on our licences. (To be honest, my new picture looks much more glam than the last, so I'm not complaining) We very nearly didn't get our motorcycle classifications transferred but we managed to catch that one at the wicket. We didn't catch that Peter's name was omitted from the car registration though. I suppose that is OK because my name appears twice. Unfortunately I only noticed that once we were home.
Home. Let's talk about home insurance. Having all our insurance with one underwriter means that now they are flagged to the fact we are not living in our home. We are considered absentee landlords, and while I'm sure that our friends Chris and Shelia are taking very good care of the place, the insurance company is convinced that they are irresponsible hoodlums planning to trash the joint and then set fire to it. The insurance company did however agree to continue coverage for more than double the price but only if we had the woodstove disconnected. I would like to point out that our woodstove is a cast iron, low emission Jotul, 8 months old and professionally installed by a WETT certified technician and is in compliance to all building codes. Apparently that is not good enough for this insurance company though. They are afraid of fire. I asked our broker if water damage from rain streaming into the kitchen from a hole in the roof was covered. She didn't see the humour.
Happily our new insurance underwriter is a national company and they are willing to cover our house in Nova Scotia as it is, at only slightly more than quadruple the original cost. Isn't that nice of them? So that holiday in Greece we were planning next month has been put on hold.
But the molasses was enough to make me screech.