Fifteen Thousand Fax Machines

The Government of Ontario has just announced it’s getting rid of its fax machines. Actually going to do it. No more studies, no more Royal Commissions, no more White Papers– this time there’s real action! Finance Minister Peter Bethlenfalvy says that by the end of the year, they’ll be gone. Gone.

The minister explained it better than I could: “Nothing says The Flintstones like a fax machine.”

The government has roughly 15,000 of these things in service. Given that a business fax line runs something in the order of $40-50 per month, the servicing cost is in the range of $600,000 to $750,000 per month, or seven to nine million per year, give or take your tax bill or mine. Not to mention the thousands of trees which will continue to live once these paper-hungry beasts are sent off to wherever we send our ancient technology.

All of us who were tech-savvy youngsters back in the day remember how exciting these things were when they first burst on the scene. But that was a career ago.

The advent of scanning and e-mail, of course, quickly made the fax machine obsolete. But notwithstanding such obsolescence of at least twenty-five years, governments have kept them in active use.

Here’s a graphic way to look at this. If the decision had been made ten years ago (the fax machine was no less obsolete then), Ontarians would have saved perhaps ninety million dollars. That’s roughly the cost of a new hospital. Twenty years ago would be two hospitals. Think of that next time officials say, “We just don’t have the funds right now.”

So why did our government keep spending $40-$50 per month per machine? Well, because nobody stopped to think about it until the current minister heard one clattering away and thought, “That’s insane!” For decades, these environmentally destructive and costly beasts just sat there gobbling up resources and tax dollars. Because nobody paid them any mind.

But before we laugh too hard at the government, let’s consider all the obsolete technology upon which we rely every day, to our economic and environmental detriment.

When this pandemic ends, you know we will revert to flying a handful of people thousands of miles for a two-hour face-to-face meeting. At what economic and environmental cost?

And when do we stop creating mountains of used-only-once plastic containers? The list goes on….

How long do we keep using Flintstone technology “just because”?