A White Cedar anti-bullying campaign image posted today to Nemat’s Facebook. Coincidence? (Image: Facebook)

Since when did the Canada Reads book competition turn into a Hunger Games–style death match? In yesterday’s debate, colourful Quebec lawyer Anne-France Goldwater accused Prisoner of Tehran author Marina Nemat of telling “a story that’s not true, and you can tell it’s not true when you read it.” (That goes a long way to explaining Nemat’s angry Facebook outburst yesterday.) But Nemat wasn’t the only one to get a Goldwater smackdown; the TV personality also called author Carmen Aguirre “a bloody terrorist,” adding, “How we let her into Canada, I don’t understand.” In response, Nemat again took to Facebook, this time to ask for a public apology from Goldwater (and to post a photo and link about bullying. Coincidence?). While she waits for that apology, Nemat can take some solace in today’s elimination of John Vaillant’s The Tiger—the book Goldwater was defending. Karma (and fuming writers) will get you every time.

The answer is simple: our curriculum is shamefully outdated, and the Liberals are too scared to fix it
By Jan Wong | Illustration by Jesse Lefkowitz

Adam and Eve nibble an apple from the Tree of Knowledge and suddenly realize they’re both naked. Unfortunately, sex ed isn’t part of God’s plan, and He evicts them from the Garden of Eden. These days, some folks in Toronto are acting quite God-like themselves, insisting that the next generation live in innocence and ignorance. Heaven forbid our youth get to know themselves in the Biblical sense.

Our public schools are under attack by an evangelical Christian organization called the Institute for Canadian Values, whose leaders believe, as a basic ideological tenet, that teaching up-to-date sex education in schools will corrupt and confuse our children. The institute is run by a man named Charles McVety, who is quite skilled at getting media attention. Shamefully, most journalists have checked their brains at the door, blandly covering the institute’s actions and claims without questioning their legitimacy or standing up against the influence of the church on the state.

While some parents feel it is solely their responsibility to educate their kids about sex, most of us—more than 85 per cent, according to the educational organization SIECCAN (the Sex Information and Education Council of Canada)—want schools to play a supporting role. This silent majority notwithstanding, our leaders are caving to splinter groups. In 2010, Premier Dalton McGuinty nervously shelved a newly revised sex ed curriculum after McVety launched an attack campaign in which he claimed to be speaking on behalf of Ontario parents.

The proposed new sex ed curriculum, three years in the making, was created by a team of health experts and educators. At 219 pages, it was meant to replace a 40-page curriculum from the 1990s—when Mike Harris was premier and a ninth-grader named Mark Zuckerberg had not yet imagined a gold mine called Facebook. Under the revised curriculum, Grade 1 students would learn the names of male and female genitalia, compared with previously learning only “the major parts of the body.” The old curriculum presumed heterosexuality. In the new one, Grade 3 students would learn about gender identity and sexual orientation through class discussion. The teaching guide mentions a scenario in which kids might say: “Some students live with two parents. Some live with one parent. Some have two mothers or two fathers. Some live with grandparents or with caregivers.” Pretty innocuous stuff, so far.

The old Grade 5 curriculum focused mainly on the physical changes at puberty. The new one focuses on emotional and social changes, too. “You can show that you like someone by being extra nice to them.…[Ways] that are inappropriate include touching them without their permission [or] spreading rumours about them to others or online.” Under the old curriculum, Grade 6 students studied “the changes at puberty to the reproductive organs and their functions.” The new one would inform them they weren’t the only ones masturbating, or having wet dreams, or experiencing vaginal lubrication. By Grade 7, students would learn about the importance of emotional readiness before having sex and the risks of contracting sexually transmitted infections through oral sex, anal sex or vaginal intercourse. You think age 13 is too young for such graphic stuff? A 2006–2007 Statistics Canada study of 13-year-olds with a girlfriend or boyfriend found that 6.5 per cent had already had sex. By age 14 and 15, the number jumps to 16.5 per cent.

(Image: Christopher Drost)

Presented with a transit plan from TTC chair Karen Stintz that would save $1.5 billion on the Eglinton Crosstown LRT, contribute to the Sheppard subway extension and bring some form of rapid transit to underserved Finch Avenue, Rob Ford stubbornly dug his heels in and reiterated his commitment to burying the Eglinton line underground. In a note on his Facebook page, Ford insists his own transit plan is “doable,” and moreover, that it’s the plan that city transit users want (apparently, users want “RAPID” transit and they want it in ALL CAPS). He also says that for “100 years, Toronto’s transit system has been based on a backbone of subways” (not true), and that the Pembina Institute supports his plan (it doesn’t). Of course, although Stintz’s proposal appears to be gaining the support of all the right players, we’re not surprised Ford is refusing to budge. If the budget debate has taught us anything it’s that the mayor will turn down a face-saving compromise, even when that compromise is likely the only thing standing between a political defeat and public embarrassment. Read the entire story [Globe and Mail] »

Fears of cyber-cheating and sexting in school are so last year
By Jesse Brown | Illustration by Till Hafenbrak

When Dalton McGuinty suggested in September 2010 that cellphones and tablets might have useful educational applications, he was savaged by both the press and his political opponents. The Toronto Sun called the idea a “terrible” surrender to already tech-addled kids who want to use gadgets only for Facebook. The National Post likened it to welcoming cigarettes and sharp objects into class. Even Wired magazine panned the idea of gadgets in school as “premature,” citing the potential for distraction, cyber-cheating and a digital divide between kids with the latest gear and kids without. The Ontario Tories picked up all the outrage and ran with it, slamming the notion as “absurd,” a prime example of just how out of touch McGuinty was, and asking, “Shouldn’t our kids be learning math and science instead?” They went on to suggest that if McGuinty gets his way, we will soon have “sexting” in our classrooms.

The real concerns parents have about bringing cellphones into class are somewhat less lurid. Kids—boys in particular—are thought to be less literate today than they were in the past. The statistics don’t back this up. The last major study conducted in Canada showed that 88 per cent of 13-year-olds were reading at or above their expected levels. Still, the general perception is that technology is the enemy of literacy. What teacher in their right mind would welcome it into their classroom?

As it turns out, there are many. There’s a digital revolution underway in education. A new generation of teachers is embracing the use of classroom technology. They want to harness the fascination kids have with glowing screens and direct it toward learning. This transition is natural for kids, but painfully hard for schools. The truth is, smart phones threaten to disrupt decades of common practice in the classroom. And that’s a good thing. Changes to the way we teach and test our kids are long overdue.

Last May, with much teacher support and little parental opposition, the TDSB voted to lift the cellphone ban that had been enacted in 2007. Granted, many teachers were simply fed up with having to enforce it in every school hallway, obligated as they were to confiscate cellphones from defiant students. But a growing contingent of educators was also eager to experiment with gadgets in class, so long as they had the authority to dictate how and when they were used. These voices prevailed, and trustees spoke excitedly of stepping into “21st-century learning” and an “enhanced” educational environment.

While hand-helds are now technically admissible, the board also temporarily allowed individual principals to prolong the ban, and most have chosen to do so. Today, more than six months since the vote and halfway into a new school year, cellphones, smart phones and tablets (or “personal technology devices,” as the board calls them) are still forbidden in most of the TDSB’s almost 600 schools.

Kids are committing suicide, parents are in a panic, and schools that neglect to protect students are lawsuit targets
By Denise Balkissoon

Mitchell Wilson had a short life. He was born in March 2000 at Markham-Stouffville Hospital to Craig and Shelley Wilson. From the age of three, he had trouble running and jumping. He climbed stairs slowly, putting both feet on each step before moving up. He fell often, and sometimes he couldn’t get up on his own. His doctors thought he had hypermobility syndrome—joints that extend and bend more than normal.

When Mitchell was seven, his mother was diagnosed with an aggressive melanoma. Her treatments left her distant, sometimes testy and mean, and in so much pain that she rarely left her bedroom. “I sort of kept Mitchell away,” Craig Wilson told me.

“He basically didn’t talk to his mother during the last four months of her life.” Wilson often left his son to his own devices while he took care of his dying wife and ran his family’s industrial knife business. Mitchell spent most of his time in his bedroom, playing video games. He comforted himself with food, and by the time he was four feet tall he weighed 167 pounds. Once, in a Walmart, he fell to the ground and his grandmother had to ask store employees to help her lift him.

In 2010, Craig Wilson remarried, to a woman named Tiffany Usher. After a campy Las Vegas ceremony during which they both wore flip-flops, the couple moved with Mitchell and Usher’s two preteen daughters into a four-bedroom house just east of Rouge Park. Usher had worked as a special education teacher, and she suspected that Mitchell’s hypermobility syndrome diagnosis wasn’t right. She took him to SickKids, where doctors determined he had a type of muscular dystrophy called limb girdle, a genetic disease that eats away at the muscle tissue in the shoulders and hips. Mitchell’s parents didn’t tell him that he’d probably die in his mid-20s, and that he’d spend his last couple of years in bed, breathing with the help of a respirator.

Muscular dystrophy usually brings with it cognitive limitations. Mitchell was labelled gifted in math but severely learning disabled in languages. This, along with his weight and his bright red hair, made him a target for teasing at Pickering’s William Dunbar P.S. Mitchell was ridiculed when he fell, and he was sometimes knocked down to be laughed at as he struggled to his feet. Other students would step on him, then give each other high-fives.

The Wilsons transferred Mitchell to Westcreek P.S. for Grade 5, and he seemed happier. He became known as a goof, even a ­troublemaker—he was regularly kicked out of French class for encouraging other students to tease the teacher by making silly sounds and faces. He found a group of friends, including a skateboarder named Max, who was in Grade 8. Having an older friend gave him confidence. Once, Max taught Mitchell how to jam the school elevator so that he’d have an excuse to skip his second-floor classes.

When you’re dead, your Facebook page becomes a permanent digital gravestone, and your family and friends (and quite possibly some strangers) will indulge in a free-for-all of trivializing hagiography. The perils of online legacies
By Nicholas Hune-Brown

It was 11 in the morning on a warm Friday in September when a 16-year-old boy named Akash Wadhwa plunged from the Mavis Road overpass onto the busy 401. Shortly afterward, Peel police found the slain body of his classmate Kiranjit Nijjar in a nearby ravine.

At Mississauga Secondary School, what had begun as a series of horrific rumours solidified, piece by piece, into a single, devastating murder-suicide story. According to reports, Wadhwa, a depressed and troubled Grade 12 student, had strangled his 17-year-old friend Nijjar and then jumped onto the highway. Before he leapt, Wadhwa had left a last message on Facebook: “SUICIDE/MURDER NOTE: Three things I learned in life. What goes around comes around. KARMA is the biggest bitch. You should NEVER CHANGE on people who love and care for you… My one main reason I did this is that life let me down way too much.”

Shocked classmates reacted to the news the same way we all react to a world-shaking event in 2011—by going online. Wadhwa’s friends started a Facebook memorial page, “RIP Akash Wadhwa,” to mourn the person they had known and prevent him from being remembered solely for his final actions. The first post read: “You will be missed by all. Doesn’t matter if you were suspected of anything. At the end of the day you were a friend, a son and a person that has touched all.” Commenters decried the group for celebrating a murderer. Why would anyone want a killer to “rest in peace”? How would Nijjar’s parents feel about a page memorializing the person who had taken their daughter’s life? Every new post produced dozens of messages arguing the merits of a 16-year-old’s actions in the brutal style familiar to anyone who reads Internet comment sections, where even the most trivial article can provoke reams of ugly accusations and name-calling. “Let’s hope this murderer rots in hell,” read a typical post. “Shut the fuck up” became the most common response.

Soon, new Facebook pages began to pop up. A second, equally contentious “RIP Akash Wadhwa” memorial page appeared that same day (confusingly, Facebook allows multiple pages with the same name). The moderator of a page in tribute to both students, “RIP Akash Wadhwa and Kiranjit Nijjar,” removed a picture of Wadhwa after it was inundated with vitriol. In response to the memorials, someone started an “Akash Wadhwa, celebrated murderer?” page dedicated to discussing the “bizarre phenomenon of public vigils for those who murder.” The “Justice for Kiranjit Nijjar” page posted an online poll soliciting opinions as the case unfolded: “Do you think Akash killed Kiran?”

In the private-public hybrid world of online social networks, the deaths of two teenagers had become fodder for debate. As strangers who had never known the students began jumping into the argument, Facebook tribute pages turned into a new, incendiary kind of virtual memorial.

Just as the Internet has changed every facet of how we live, so it is changing the way we die. Death is increasingly something you find out about on your laptop or smart phone. Unless the deceased is particularly close, you’re likely to learn of a friend’s death the same way you find out about her birthday or engagement—as a blip on your Facebook news feed, sandwiched between party photos and cute animal videos.

In just a few short years, the Facebook memorial page has become an accepted rite of mourning, appropriate for both public figures like Jack Layton and private citizens like Kiranjit Nijjar. When someone dies, his or her online profile page also undergoes an immediate transformation. Last year, when a friend of a friend of mine died, her Facebook page instantly changed from the log of a living person’s thoughts and feelings and trivial interests into a digital shrine. Her final status update, which just happened to be a message of hope and optimism, took on new significance. The page became a place where friends could visit months and even a year later to look at pictures, commiserate with one another and leave messages for the deceased and for her friends and family.

I’m among the first generation to come of age on the Internet. By 13, I was an expert at chat room sex, spotting cyber-pervs and hiding my secret life from my parents
By Alexandra Molotkow | Illustrations by Dave Lapp

In 1997, when I was in Grade 6, my friends and I sat at the back of the classroom and talked about sex. We would speculate on what it felt like and place bets on how old we’d be when we finally lost our virginity. We would make fun of the way orgasms sounded in movies and imagine what celebrities’ sex lives involved. Later, at home, we’d reconvene on ICQ, one of the Internet’s first major instant messaging systems, which allowed us to have conversations we wouldn’t want our parents overhearing. That was what the Internet was to us: pretty much what a tree house would have been a few years earlier.

My parents are public sector employees, and they love me as much as parents of only children tend to love their only child. The Beach, which can resemble a small town, is a nice place to grow up. There was a swimming pool nearby, a candy store and a Canadian–Chinese food restaurant called the Garden Gate, which everyone called “The Goof” due to a time when a “Good Food” sign had a few burned-out lights. Of course, the streetcars would ferry us downtown if we ever had the guts to board them. Most of us didn’t. We were good kids.

My family got its first computer when I was in Grade 3. My mom thought it would be a good learning resource for me, but I mostly used it to play side-scrolling MS-DOS games, along with a CD-ROM program called 3-D Movie Maker. When we got the Internet a year later, I used it to make friends with other 3-D movie makers across the globe. People I’d never met in person befriended me over interests that, at the time, felt esoteric. It was a revelation.

I am part of the first generation to come of age online, and my adolescent development dovetails with that of the social web. I’ve lived over half my life through the Internet. My memory often fails to distinguish which of my experiences were real and which were digital. I’ve had many friends I never physically met, and there have been times when real life felt like the limbo between moments lived online.

The “Net Generation”—what the pundit Don Tapscott named us—now stands at 43 per cent of the population, or 15 million Canadians. We grew up in ways that were radically different from any generation before us. In theory, the Internet unshackled us from our milieus.

If we didn’t fit in at school, we could find a social group online. We congregated on mailing lists, online message boards and social networking sites—bolt.com when I was a kid, Facebook today. We could express ourselves in more ways than our parents could ever have dreamed of: online journals (like LiveJournal and DiaryLand) allowed us to share the minutiae of our lives; webspace providers (GeoCities and Angelfire, as well as niche servers like Envy.nu), and then blogs, allowed us to build monuments to ourselves, or at least the people we wanted to be.

It’s no wonder our narcissism has skyrocketed. Today, we are empowered to say anything to a potential audience of millions. And unfortunately, I was empowered to do so during the most shallow period of my life. When I was in elementary school, the spectre of one’s “permanent record” was a deterrent from bad behaviour, a kind of bureaucratic Grimm villain who would strike years in the future, when we least expected it. Now kids write their own permanent records, in graphic detail. We compromise our own privacy in return for validation.

We grew up publicly, and we grew up fast. Kids have always been obsessed with sex, but they’ve never had access to as much explicit content as they can download—according to one study, 42 per cent of 10- to 17-year-olds surveyed had seen porn online in the past year—and the option to erase their trespasses with the “Clear History” button. But porn is old school: there have never been so many opportunities to hook up, virtually or in reality. A 2005 study by the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire found that one in seven kids had received sexual advances online.

I was one such kid—often, I solicited those advances. Although few admitted it at the time, my friends did, too: after school, before their parents got home; at night, after their parents went to bed. We had cybersex long before the real thing

It’s official (Image: Tsar Kasim)

Former councillor and one-time mayoral aspirant Adam Giambrone recently married his long-time partner Sarah McQuarrie, according to, uh, Facebook. The Toronto Star reports that Giambrone changed his marital status on Facebook, provoking an outpouring of likes and comments. Apparently the wedding took place at One King West, although Giambrone, true to form, couldn’t help but post a link to a Torontoist story about transit cuts in the minutes leading up the big moment. At the time of publication, the like count on his post is 135.

• Giambrone and McQuarrie now husband and wife [Toronto Star]

One of the essays in your new book argues that privacy has become an endangered species. Can you explain?
Threats to our privacy have proliferated. The Citizen Lab here at the Munk School discovered a group operating through servers in China that was able to remotely access people’s webcams. Think about that. As we’re sitting here, someone is hacking into your computer. When you go back to transcribe this interview, they will have a picture of you and a record of everything you have done.

That’s mildly terrifying. But it doesn’t appear that the general public is too concerned. We post every conceivable detail of our lives on Facebook and Twitter.
Well, that’s the really interesting contradiction. Threats to our privacy abound, and yet people voluntarily share intimate details through social media and email.

No.
But they are public! And they’re permanent and traceable, and with appropriate procedures, authorities can access them. The only issue is: are you a person of interest?

I think not. But you probably are.
Yes—but I don’t use Facebook or Twitter, and I treat my email and cellphone conversations as public.

What if you want to discuss something really juicy?
I meet for a face-to-face conversation.

That sounds paranoid.
Well, no. In, say, the 1970s, if you wrote a letter, and if you were a person of int­erest, a government agency with adequate legal grounds could intercept your mail. That has not changed. The difference today is that we say much more because technology is so quick. And it’s not only governments that can read what we’re sending: it’s also criminal networks and politically motivated networks. So it’s not a more paranoid environment, it’s a more penetrable environment.

WikiLeaks made sensitive diplomatic cables public. How has that event changed our world, one year later?
In a funny way, WikiLeaks has made communications more secure. Diplomats now understand that the cables they write back home are functionally public documents, and they write them that way. If they need to send sensitive information, they will classify it as top secret so that it’s encrypted. So in that way, communications have become less transparent—the opposite of what Julian Assange wanted.

In a way, the Internet has turned us all into stalkers. Do you check out the Facebook pages of PhD students you’re thinking of hiring?
No, because I think people are entitled to indiscretions. I don’t want to know if someone drank too much in first year. I am interested in the quality of their work and in their values and commitments.

So how do we restore the sanctity of privacy and secrecy? It would seem that there’s no turning this bus around.
In a world where everything is public, people start to treasure private space. They carve it out, and it becomes more important to them. They safeguard it.

Effectively creating a public identity and a private identity.
Exactly.

So we might see you on Facebook after all.
Ha! Well, not this year…

Sept. 20, 2011, 3:57 p.m. George Brown gaming graduate Billy Matjiunis at Ubisoft’s Wallace Street studio (Image: Sean J. Sprague)

Video gamers are often maligned as dweebs with vitamin D deficiencies and a dearth of flesh-and-blood friends, but that probably described Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg at one point, too. We’re not saying that nephew of yours who posts his Call of Duty missions on YouTube will be the next great tech entrepreneur, but he could be, and Toronto has become the right place to be if he wants to try. Take the success story of east-end studio Capybara Games, whose app Sword and Sworcery ranked only behind Angry Birds on sales charts in March. Or Queen West’s Get Set Games, whose ultra-addictive Mega Jump has been downloaded 17 million times since last May. The triumphs of these smallish firms are part of the reason giants like Ubisoft and Zynga set up shop here, contributing to what has become a $240-million-a-year industry in Ontario. Traditionally, luring console kings into the workforce has been a challenge, which is why we’re big fans of George Brown College’s spiffy new video game incubator. Launching this month, it’s a gleaming space that puts game design students and start-ups side by side. The gadgetry is a geek’s fantasy: a soon-to-be-installed 3-D motion-tracking studio that captures and reproduces human movements with jaw-dropping accuracy, and a sea of tricked-out computers that would give Watson a run for its money. Tech wizards who might have headed to Silicon Valley after graduation can now get schooled and land a job in the same place. And if they invent the next Facebook, well, we can say we saw it coming.

Image: Christopher Drost

The story of Rob Ford’s encounter with the CBC’s This Hour Has 22 Minutes took a potty-mouthed turn this morning with news that Ford allegedly berated 911 dispatchers and insisted that he was, in fact, “Rob Fucking Ford.” But now the Globe and Mail disputes these claims, reporting that the CBC’s story is inaccurate, as does Doug Ford, offering a competing interpretation of the events in an interview with the Toronto Star. The mayor also released a statement on his Facebook page this afternoon, providing his own take as to what went down that fateful morning. Read the entire statement, after the jump.

Here’s what happened, according to Ford:

On Monday morning, I was ambushed in the driveway of my home by two people who rushed up to me screaming and waving at me, while I was trying to leave my home and get my daughter off to school.  They prevented me from getting into my van and closing the door.  Concerned for my safety and that of my family, I called 9-1-1 for help and retreated into my home. The two individuals fled to their black SUV and left before police arrived.

I later learned that the two individuals were part of a television comedy program. I remain concerned that their behaviour was traumatic for my daughter and in no way acceptable professional behaviour.  They trespassed on my property and refused to leave when asked.  They physically prevented me from leaving my property.

This morning, the same television network responsible for the comedy program published a report alleging that I made foul and derogatory comments towards the female 9-1-1 staff.  That allegation is absolutely false.

When I made the 9-1-1 call, I was concerned and upset.  I was repeatedly told police were arriving soon.  In another call, I expressed frustration with the delay and said that I had to leave to go to City Hall.  I did use the “f-word” at some point as I expressed my frustration with the situation.  After being attacked in my driveway, I hope I can be excused for saying the f-word.  I never called anyone any names. I apologize for expressing my frustration inappropriately.

Just because you can watch TV on your smart phone doesn’t mean you should

Television studios spend fortunes shooting in high definition, creating special effects and paying good-looking actors—and it’s not so their shows can be watched on iPads. This season, passive viewers and diehards alike should consider watching TV the old-fashioned way: on TV. The wafer-thin Samsung Plasma 8000 Series isn’t game changing, but it does exactly what a TV should do in the age of the Internet. It has built-in Wi-Fi so you can stream shows without cumbersome commercials or awkward network scheduling, and it comes loaded with social media apps like Skype and Facebook, so you can discuss The Office’s new boss with friends in real time. But the best part is that you can do all of that on a blisteringly sharp 64-inch plasma screen—the kind of screen that makes even the latest iteration of The Bachelor seem worth watching. With 26 weeks of new episodes ahead, it’s time to start clearing your social calendars. Samsung Plasma 8000 Series 64-inch TV, $4,000. Bay Bloor Radio, 55 Bloor St. W., 416-967-1122.

(Image: Carlo Mendoza)

I can’t say specifically which fabulous new technology made me decide I needed a break from all fabulous new technologies. For years I had been blissfully work-playing and play-working in the miasma of plugged-in life, writing magazine columns while live-streaming baseball games and listening to music and IMing and playing online chess and checking my email every two minutes, and not worrying whether performing five or six tasks simultaneously might limit my ability to perform any of them adequately. Maybe it was the iPad, a device designed, as far as I can tell, to allow you to watch television while you’re watching television. A friend told me about trying to talk to her teenage son while he was on his iPhone. “Why are you always looking at that thing when I’m trying to talk to you?” she asked. He answered: “Where do you think I learned it from, Mom?”

My own household seemed headed down a similar path. I needed to step away. I needed to go look at a tree. I discussed it with my wife, who was feeling similarly tech-ed out, and we made a monumental family decision. We were going to impose a digital Sabbath. Because my wife is Jewish, our Sabbath goes from Friday night to Saturday night. Though we discussed various options—TV but no email? Google Maps but no cellphones?—in the end we went with a hard line: no screens of any kind. No BlackBerrys, no cellphones, no iPads, no laptops, no TV.

The first thing I discovered is how surprisingly difficult it is to live without screens, and not just because of the obvious inconveniences. There’s a wide-ranging and largely unresolved debate between sociologists and neurologists, much of it centred on Nicholas Carr’s book The Shallows, about how deeply the Internet is affecting our brain chemistry. All I can say is that my own brain is overwhelmed by the absence of screens on Friday night. I’m jittery, like my mind is a crumpled piece of paper uncrumpling. The digital Sabbath makes me realize how deeply the tendency toward distraction has been ingrained in my consciousness. It’s hard for me just to play Lego with my son. It’s hard just to read a newspaper.

(Image: Alberto Garcia)

Markham has made voting in municipal elections as easy as indicating your preference for hockey over politics, an experiment that has apparently shaken some non-voters out of their complacency. The city offers online voting for advanced polls, and a recent report finds that—surprise—making voting easy and hassle free can result in significantly more people casting ballots.

The Toronto Star has the story:

Voter turnout at advance polls increased by 300 per cent in 2003 and continued to increase through the 2006 and 2010 elections. Michelle Huycke was among those early online voters in Markham last year.

She was among the 91 per cent of Internet voters who cast their ballot from home and among the 99 per cent who were satisfied with the online voting process.

“I didn’t have to find out where I was going to vote, or leave the house or worry about making it to the poll on time,” said Huycke, 64. “Plus it’s easy and you don’t have to wait in line.”

Of course, we probably could have told Elections Canada that making voting easier would lead to increased voter turnout (overall, voter turnout in Markham rose from 26.7 per cent in 2003 to 36 per cent in 2010). But obvious or not, it’s probably not a bad thing to see more people casting their ballot, although the report does say that Internet voting appears to be declining among young people. Next up: voting on Facebook.

• Internet voting in advance polls a great success in Markham, report finds [Toronto Star]
• A Comparative Assessment of Electronic Voting [Elections Canada]