When I first moved to the west coast it was 1995.
There was a huge immigration boom as everyone was trying to get out of Hong Kong before the handover in 1997.
In the 3-4 years leading up to the hand over the population of Vancouver and the surrounding cities went up by about 700,000 people.
The problem is that the drivers licence that they all held from Hong Kong was not valid here and they had to start all over again.
So some people who work for our equivalent of the DMV saw an opportunity to make money and started selling drivers licence for $10,000 a pop.
No one could figure out the actual total but the guestamite was there are about 50,000 people driving around that never really got their licence and trust me it shows.
On a side note, since they could never figure out the extent of the whole ordeal in order to stop it they made most foreign licences acceptable for transfer meaning they could get a B.C. licence without so much as a written test.