President-elect Donald Trump wants to make America write again — with old-fashioned pen and paper.

Proclaiming “no computer is safe,” Trump told reporters on New Year’s Eve: “You know, if you have something really important, write it out and have it delivered by courier, the old-fashioned way.”

If nothing else, the advice may tell us how much importance Trump attaches to his endless, online stream of Twitter pronouncements. Presumably, the president-elect’s messages of greater significance are being hand-written and hand-delivered elsewhere, perhaps even on horseback.

But last year also taught us that Trump has a knack for tapping into the public mood — in this case, it’s suspicion about technology. And he may be on to something: 2016 may come to be known as the year that we learned that high tech is not the answer to everything, and 2017 may see us asking more pointed questions about the digital revolution in politics and government.

The roots of the distrust may be originating in the U.S., but like other political trends, it could easily spill over into Canada, and may in fact have started to do so already. Tens of thousands of federal public servants, for instance, may be wishing that the Phoenix payroll system could be exchanged for old-fashioned paper or punch cards.

The Russian election-hacking allegations in the U.S. — which prompted Trump’s anti-computer remarks on Dec. 31 — stand to be the most serious example of technology gone bad in 2016. As Americans begin to absorb the very real possibility that their most basic, civic exercise was subject to foreign interference in cyberspace, what’s that going to do to their faith in their voting system — much of it managed by machine?

In November, millions of Americans cast ballots through scanners, ballot-marking devices or ATM-like machines, which were then counted electronically. Now, with a new president advising people to send their most important messages with pen and paper, it would seem that old-fashioned paper ballots might enjoy a revival.

That’s already the route Canada has chosen. Pointedly, in its recent report on electoral reform, the special Commons committee flatly rejected online voting as an imminent possibility in this country.

Here’s how the prospect was summed up and dismissed in the report, issued at the beginning of December.

“The committee acknowledges that many Canadians are open to the idea of online voting as a way of making voting more accessible. However, both supporters and detractors of online voting agree that the secrecy, security, and integrity of the ballot and the federal electoral process are fundamental. The committee heard significant testimony (and received submissions), particularly from experts in technology, that the secrecy and integrity of an online ballot cannot be guaranteed to a sufficient degree to warrant widespread implementation in federal elections. The committee agrees.”

Meanwhile, yet another Commons committee is due to begin an important study in 2017 on political-party databases and, in particular, whether they are infringing on Canadians’ right to privacy.

The idea of such a study by the Access to Information and Ethics committee was championed by NDP MP Daniel Blaikie, who is also his party’s deputy critic for ethics. It’s an idea long overdue: ever since the so-called “robocalls” controversy, revolving around how the Conservative database may have been used to practise voter suppression in the 2011 campaign, Canada has needed to take a hard look at what information the parties are maintaining in their digital records.

All of the big political parties in Canada have been expanding their databases of voter information in the past decade, and they are now seen as crucial to electoral fortunes. The Liberals, woefully behind the Conservatives and New Democrats on this score, believe they only became competitive after catching up, then surpassing their rivals in digital campaigning in 2015. (I’ve dealt with some of this in the 2016 update to my own book, Shopping For Votes.)

But because political parties are neither entirely private nor public institutions, they fall into a grey area when it comes to privacy protection — and those databases, as the outgoing Chief Electoral Officer put it, are operating in the “Wild West” of privacy laws.

One of Canada’s leading experts on privacy and political data, Colin Bennett, who writes often here for iPolitics, carried out a study for Canada’s Privacy Commissioner several years ago, urging tighter controls on the databases.

When he was testifying at the Information and Ethics committee last September, Bennett stressed that some lines need to be drawn between the data that Canadians provide to their government and the data that political parties have at their fingertips.

“The ability for members of Parliament, in their capacities as members of Parliament, to capture data that might possibly be of interest when the election comes around is now increased,” Bennett said. “That, I think, produces a heightened need to do something about this major category of databases that are simply not covered by our privacy regime.”

At last report, the Access to Information and Ethics committee hadn’t yet set up a schedule or deadline for its study of the political databases. One wonders, though, whether the urgency for such a study has been ramped up in the wake of the Russian-hacking stories in the U.S., or even the ongoing Phoenix payroll mess in Canada.

Whenever they do get around to it, you’ll know this study is serious if the committee asks for experts to send in their submissions on paper, by courier.