B.C. Legislature. Photo by Herb Neufeld (flickr's Oggie Dog)

On the second day our government sat in the B.C. Legislature, Speaker Linda Reid admonished then-unelected premier Christy Clark for passing notes to a cabinet minister during a debate. Clark had not yet won the Westside–Kelowna byelection, and so was relegated to the legislature’s public galleries.

The incident made me harken back to my years in middle school, which I doubt was Clark’s or Reid’s intent. In those olden times, many notes written on paper changed hands anytime a teacher turned his back on a class.

Of course, that was before there was a smartphone in every pocket and a computer on every desk. When a desktop was the flat, horizontal surface which supported the paper you wrote your notes on. When a notebook was a collection of bound and ruled paper.

Not that those low-tech methods of communication—note-passing included—were superior to today’s methods.

The Kremlin might disagree with me on that one. In an effort to prevent National Security Agency-style cyberspying, the Kremlin’s secret service recently decided to revert to using old-fashioned typewriters and paper to write and store official secrets.,,,

Continue reading at the Victoria Times Colonist