MPI slams brakes on Saturday hours at Gateway, Bison, Main Street service centres

The option of booking a Saturday appointment at Manitoba Public Insurance for a road test is coming to a dead end.

MPI announced this week it will no longer offer road tests — or other Autopac services — on Saturdays at its Winnipeg service centres at Gateway, Bison and Main Street, starting April 6.

Instead, the three service centres will have expanded hours from Monday to Friday, from 7:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.

Dana Frazer, MPI’s vice-president and chief operations officer, said in a statement that the changes are part of its continued monitoring of service delivery and “keeping customer and employee experience at the forefront.”

MPI spokeswoman Tara Seel said the changes in available days for road tests are the result of having hundreds of testing spots left unfilled during the week.

Statistics provided by MPI show that in 2025, the Bison, Main Street and Gateway locations had only two per cent of the total 6,500 test slots unbooked on Saturdays.

Meanwhile, at the same time, thousands of spots were being left unfilled between Monday and Friday at those locations.

Wednesday was, by far, the most popular day for booking appointments in 2025, with 8,224 at Bison, 4,017 at Gateway, and 8,633 at Main Street.

“If you offer Saturdays, people will take it, but there’s a lot of cost to opening on a Saturday when we have vacancies during the week,” Seel said Friday. “We need testers, supervisors and front counter staff to issue licences.

“It makes sense to consolidate it. We have responsibilities to taxpayers and our rate payers and we have to be as fiscally responsible as we can.”

Seel said MPI looked at many other options and concluded taking Saturday out of the mix was the most cost-efficient.

But Kyle Ross, president of the Manitoba Government and General Employees’ Union, questions the changes.

“I think we are going to hear frustrations from customers, that’s for sure,” Ross said. “I struggle to understand this move… MPI provides great customer service.

“I think there is going to be frustration when someone pulls up to a service centre, that has been open on a Saturday since inception, and when they pull on that door and it is locked and says you have to come here on a weekday.

“It is unfortunate it has come to this and decisions are being made over what sounds like dollars and cents when it should me made about customer service.”

Meanwhile, Seel said road test backlogs that kept student drivers waiting for months for appointments following a 10-week strike at MPI in 2023, has been cleared.

“Looking at the next 14 days, there are 200 available spots at Bison alone,” she said.

kevin.rollason@freepress.mb.ca