May 2, 2007 (Richmond Hill, ON) – As the weather heats up across Canada, bicycles come out of winter storage to provide riders with eco-friendly transportation as well as a great way to keep fit. But with over 62,000 bicycles reported stolen in Canada each year, according to Stats Can, and at least double that number of stolen bikes going unreported, bike ownership carries a big risk.

To diminish the chances that a stolen bike will remain lost forever, www.bikeregistrycanada.com, Canada’s first national bilingual bike registry, provides an online database that police departments across the country can access to reunite a stolen bike with its rightful owner. “If a stolen bike is registered with us,” says bikeregistrycanada.com president Katie Renwick, “police anywhere in the country can link the bike back to its owner.”

Constable Tim Fanning, media relations officer for the Vancouver Police Department, says bike theft in that city alone results in “well over” $1 million a year in property loss. “We have over 1,400 reported bike thefts per year, on average,” he says, adding that no lock system is foolproof. Unreported thefts, he says, likely double the number. Fanning says only a small fraction of the bikes stolen in Vancouver are ever recovered, and an even smaller number are ever actually returned to their owners. He sees bikeregistrycanada.com as a positive step. “Anything that will help police prove a bike is stolen and return it to its owner is a positive,” he says.

Bikeregistrycanada.com is the brainchild of Renwick, 27, and older sisters Jane and Trish. They found that while many police departments across Canada offered a bike registration service in their own district, no system existed to connect one local registry with another in the same region, let alone across provincial borders. If a bike was stolen in the regional municipality of Durham, Ont., for example, but found somewhere else in Greater Toronto, there was no way to trace the bike back. Unclaimed bikes ended up languishing in police property rooms, Katie Renwick relates, and eventually would be sold at auction. “This process was going nowhere,” she says. “People were not getting their bikes back.”

The bikeregistrycanada.com registry aims to transform the dismal recovery rate with its national database. To sign up for the service that is available in both English and French, bike owners enter an email address and password on the registry site, along with details about their bike, such as make, model, colour, frame size and serial number. An individual registration costs $10 for ten years while a value-pack registration designed for families costs $25 and covers up to five bikes for a ten-year period.

Mountain Equipment Co-op (MEC), the country’s largest supplier of outdoor gear and clothing, has partnered with bikeregistrycanada.com. “We don’t form a lot of partnerships,” says Selena McLachlan, marketing and research manager for MEC, which has 2.5 million members and 11 outlets stretching from Victoria to Halifax, “and we’re very strategic about the partnerships we do form. Bike theft is a big problem, it’s a growing problem, and it’s something we want to help combat. Bikeregistrycanada.com is the only registry that has a national database. Feedback from our members, anecdotally, has been very positive. People see value in the service.”

Katie Renwick knows first-hand the frustration and sense of helplessness many bike owners experience. Her own trusty bike, bought at Canadian Tire, was stolen six years ago when she was a student at Concordia University in Montreal. “I walked out of class and my bike was gone,” Renwick remembers. She didn’t bother to report it. “As a student, I never heard success stories about stolen bikes being recovered. I was just part of the statistics.” Now she’s aiming to turn the statistics around with <http://www.bikeregistrycanada.com/>www.bikeregistrycanada.com

New ideas and technology to combat bike theft are continually under development at bikeregistrycanada.com, including a free Bike Check Service allowing anyone to verify if a bike they have purchased secondhand, such as at a garage sale, may have been stolen.

Bikeregistrycanada.com is sponsored by Veri-Cheque Ltd., a leading financial protection company located in Richmond Hill, Ont. that has been in business for 30 years providing services to companies across Canada, including credit and cheque guarantees. It also offers extended warranties for used vehicles through its subsidiary, Ensurall, which administers the bikeregistrycanada.com website. For more information, visit www.vericheque.com, www.ensurall.com.