The filed record
The Last Time Internet Regulations Were Passed, People Said, “Fax It To Me” - by Councillor Paul Ainslie, seconded by Councillor Stephen Holyday
The Public Gallery wrote no story on this item. What follows is the city’s own record of what happened to it, as filed: nothing on this page is summarised or scored by us.
The decision
2021-05-05 · Toronto City Council · adopted
As filed
City Council on May 5 and 6, 2021, adopted the following: 1. City Council direct the City Manager, in consultation with the Chief Technology Officer, to draft a plan by the end of 2021 to phase out traditional telephone fax lines for City Divisions.
On the agenda
As the city filed it
A relic of an era when the "web" was still something spiders spun, the fax machine has withstood the advent of email, text and instant messaging to live on in several sectors, including health care. But its continued use carries extra costs and even risk. And in Ontario, the Ontario government directed the Province's public service to phase out its 1,500 traditional telephone fax lines by the end of the year. For residents more familiar with Instagram than gramophones, now is a good time to clear up two things.
Show the rest of As the city filed it, 815 more characters as filed
A fax machine is a device which scans paper, then transmits the image of the page, using a land line, to another fax machine, which then typically prints out a copy. And The Flintstones was a cartoon set in the Stone Age. An early version of the fax (short for "facsimile") was invented in 1843, but it wasn't commonly used until the 1980s when the devices became commonplace in Canadian offices. In 1988, CBC reported that "What's your fax number?" had become one of the most frequently asked questions in business. More than three decades later, many consider the fax obsolete. Facebook recently took out newspaper ads directed at U.S. lawmakers with the tagline, "The last time internet regulations were passed, people said, 'Fax it to me,'" alluding to 25 years ago. ** Credit to Yahoo News for the background**
Staff recommended
Councillor Paul Ainslie, seconded by Councillor Stephen Holyday, recommends that: 1. City Council direct the City Manager, in consultation with the Chief Technology Officer, to draft a plan by the end of 2021 to phase out traditional telephone fax lines for City Divisions.
On the record
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