SoNice of you

I was at a public event not long ago at which the size of the audience had outgrown the number of chairs available. I had gotten there early, and was occupying a chair. Among those standing up were a number of women.

So I faced a dilemma. Do I follow the tradtional etiquette rule, and offer to yield the chair to a lady? Or do I follow today’s convention that apparently puts equality between the sexes at the top of the list? I chose the traditional option, but didn’t feel great about it—probably because by hesitating to think about it, I obliterated whatever tincture of chivalry the gesture might have contained.

That was just one small interaction. The complete social cost of this sort of uncertainty has been estimated by two Ontario government studies at between $3 billion and $7.9 trillion annually—money that could be saved and better spent on our infrastructure or, theoretically, on debt reduction.

So you will be as pleased as I was to hear that, building upon its successes in the fields of green energy, electronic health record keeping and emergency air transportation, Ontario plans to announce legislation later today to codify the basic rules of public etiquette. It’s going to be called the Social Niceties Act—“But we call it the SoNice Act for short, and you should too,” says a staffer we talked to.

Now, before you get yourself all a-twitter about how you’ll be damned if the government is going to tell you what shirt to wear at the dinner table, you should know the SoNice Act will only apply to what are termed “public interactions.” What shirt you wear, or whether you even wear one at all, will, so long as you are in your own home, be your business. The rules will only apply in any place you might reasonably expect to encounter another member of the public.

The anticipated legislation will allow the cabinet to set, and change from time time, a list of up to 50 standards of public interaction. For example, the standards might state that a person may not participate in a public interaction withour wearing a shirt, or that no public seating need be yielded on the basis of gender alone. “We’re staying away from knife-and-fork placement and that sort of thing,” says our source. “We really just want to address the core problems.”

Does it sound somewhat Orwellian? “The people of Ontario should have no worries about the SoNice Act,” says our source, “because there are lots of exemptions.” These exemptions will be administered by a new regulatory body, the Public Interactions Commission (PInC).

The PInC can issue exemptions for particular interactions for a number of reasons, which PInC itself will be writing. One expected exemption is, for example, “old-school etiquette expectations.” The lady to whom I yielded my seat might wish to apply for an exemption to the no-need-to-yieldseating rule. The PInC would then have six months to decide if there were any reason she should not be granted the exemption. Once issued her exemption, she would then simply have to flash her PINC-issued card at me to show that she was exempted from that particular standard of public interaction, and I would be obliged to comply. Other exemptions are to be listed in relation to particular public interactions. “Needs to tan skin at beach and has adequate sunscreen,” for example, is expected to be a common exemption to the shirt-wearing standard.

It almost sounds like some kind of social driver’s licence, doesn’t it? Well, there are some big differences that indicate the SoNice Act is much less draconian. For starters, the government plans to mount a massive advertising campaign over the next year, before the Act comes into effect on April 1, 2016. When it does, Ontarians will not need to apply for any sort of licence to engage in public interactions. Instead, everyone will be deemed to know about and be capable of complying with the law. At the outset, the PInC (which by law must be chaired by a former cabinet minister who has unsuccessfully sought re-election, in order to balance fairness with expediency) will be busy granting exemptions.

However, once the initial backlog of exemptions is cleared, the focus will shift to dealing with complaints against individuals for failure to adhere to the standards of public interaction. Any resident of Ontario will be able to complain about any other resident. The first two complaints will be kept on file, but will have no other consequence. Once a third complaint is made, however, the person will be called in for testing by the PInC. He or she must demonstrate a familiarity with the SoNice Act by scoring at least 17 out of 20 answers correctly, just as in a driver’s test.

If a person fails the test, he or she will be required to sport a colourful—and specially designed for the new program after a competition among leading designers— trillium symbol on his or her chest during all public interactions, indicating to the world at large that the wearer is deficient in the standards of public interaction. The person must continue to wear the symbol until the test has been passed. If a person fails the test twice or more, he or she can also be requested to attend re-education sessions in a special camp-like setting. “It won’t be anything like in China,” chuckles our source. “The smog’s a lot worse there.”

That’s the bare bones of what I am told the SoNice Act will look like. Check tonight’s news for more. In the meantime, let’s give our government credit for sussing out the problem and designing such an ingenious piece of legislation to address it. SoNice of you.

 dsimmonds@wellingtontimes.ca