Canada 'sleepwalking' into cashless society, consumer advocates warn

They just need to remove regulations. The reason there's a duopoly is that it's nearly impossible for a startup today to start a similar payment network.

Break? It's practically enshrined in the law, seeing as any given bank can only have one credit card affiliated with it. So if I'm e.g. a normal National Bank client, I get to have a Visa card or no card at all.

I suppose online banks could change things a bit, but without that, introducing a new credit card provider is practically impossible.

Canada's credit cards work on Visa, MasterCard, or Amex networks. However, debit cards work on a domestic network called Interac. About half of card transactions in Canada are debit card transactions.

https://payments.ca/sites/default/files/PaymentsCanada_Canad... page 7

EDIT: In the past few years, many Canadian banks have started issuing dual-network debit cards that bear both Visa and Interac logos (sometimes MasterCard and Interac). These cards use the Interac network in Canada, but can also be used online and abroad using the second network. I just wanted to mention it for people who may be curious about the apparent shift in debit card networks.

We are sleepwalking toward an absolute totalitarian panopticon in the name of convenience. The cashless thing is just a tiny part.

I had little to no sympathy with the protestors either but that definitely crossed a line, and do we really think that will only ever be used against those kinds of protestors. I’m sure it will happen at some point to indigenous people protesting an oil and gas project or something. It’s now a tool in the arsenal to crush protests.

The wiki article you linked specifically says it's for more then war like conditions.

"take extraordinary temporary measures to respond to public welfare emergencies, public order emergencies..."

It’s actually super easy to do but the public will hate it. Pass a law that credit card surcharges MUST be added onto the final price.

That 2% cashback you get for using your Amex isn’t due to Amex generosity. That’s literally what retailers pay.

Right now I will absolutely use my cc for anything I can. It’s literally cheaper than cash and users of cash subsidise all my purchases. The only way to fix this is to force the surcharges on the cc users so cash users aren’t subsidising the price. But good luck getting that passed as law. Everyone either doesn’t care or thinks they are getting an amazing deal from the 2% back. It’s got to the point where stores that add a cc surcharge will be called out on social media when all they are doing is preventing cash from subsidising credit cards.

You may be interested in reading about digital euro https://www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/digital_euro/html/index.en.ht...

Although it's nothing concrete yet afaik

The MOU of the protestors was to overthrow the government. Seems like an appropriate response.

https://archive.org/details/convoymou2022/page/3/mode/2up

They take away your freedom in one area X, and when they want to take away your freedom in another area Y you go, "it's ok, we have bigger problems like X".

> I feel like it would be easy to just mandate stores to have to allow for cash transactions.

While cards have fees, cash has overhead too: you need to go to the bank for deposits, make sure you have enough change, worry about people walking in robbing your till (thus traumatizing staff), keeping a balance (to reduce 'shrinkage' from employees).

Yes, it is "easy" to mandate it, but that is adding a 'regulatory burden' to business owners.

Some US jurisdictions do require businesses accept cash. My company would love to stop taking cash, but because some locations are in those jurisdictions it's easier to just take it everywhere.

Weren't the Chinese playing with two types of virtual currency? One that goes down in value quickly over time? So you get paid 'savings' and 'spending cash'.

Government cards often have complex requirements associated with them, for example what can be purchased. Some of the older processing specs only allow for a small number of purchased item classifications to be passed. Under those as long as someone purchased 20 approved items they could purchase whatever they wanted after that because the spec allowed 20 item specific segments.

> The number one benefit of going full cashless is just controlling inflation. It's MUCH easier to regulate supply if the supply isn't physical.

To what extent is inflation influenced by the physical money supply? Isn't it just banks that control it at their discount window?

> The number one benefit of going full cashless is just controlling inflation. It's MUCH easier to regulate supply if the supply isn't physical.

I don't think you appreciate the experiment you're enrolling yourself into here though. There are those who would rather not suffer negative interest rates and whatever else "for the greater good as seen fit by The Fed". Fiat currency was a great financial innovation, but it has sort of mixed results, and this is turning it up to 11.

It's kind of like saying, "It's going to be MUCH easier to catch criminals if the government has a live feed from everyone's visual cortex via microchip." And you're right, but...

We put coins in a small bowl and take it to a change machine once in a while.

I hate it too and limit my credit card to use to online transactions because of the fraud protections.

I do not have any credit cards, and I prefer to deal with cash as much as possible. When I am going out to buy something, I will take the money with me; I am OK with carrying coins. Even if anonymous payment is available, I will still prefer to deal with cash.

The whole point of a credit card is that you're not spending your own money!

I hate paying by card because the bank sells all my transaction details to Oracle's pals. I go through an ATM every time I intend to spend cash.

2024 goals: disable and remove telematics and lender lo-jack units from soon-to-be paid off vehicle (I have VAG-COM and VCDS for it), find a pot shop which either accepts a pseudonym in their system or just doesn't use SaaS CRM hackable garbage like Meadows (goodbye TS/SCI if Beijing ever hacks one of those looking for glowboys to leverage) to manage sales.

This is the main reason why card/phone payments are taking over. It isn't some grand conspiracy by banks/shadowy cabals/governments - it's just much more practical than to pay with cash. Also the fact that it costs less to accept card payments only than deal with cash for small places (coffe shops and the like).

The correct course of action here is government regulations ensuring an even playing field for payment providers, transaction fees caps, and strong privacy protections around them. Not luddite nonsense like forcing cash to be accepted everywhere.

It’s also annoying to use a password manager. It would be much easier to just use the same password on every account.

> The bad feeling I get from cashless is "what if some future political conflict will lower the status of my ethnicity to such a low position, so I'll be denied buying food and nobody will care?" or some similar scenario.

I don't mean to be obtuse, but how would cash solve this? If someone is bigoted against you and won't take cash from you, or marks up the price or engages in some other less obvious manipulation, and you're not in a position to rely on law enforcement, then what can you do about it?

Not coming out here for or against cashless, but if things were that bad cash would be the least of my problems.

The risk is at the point of entry of your money, not the point of exit.

Find me an employer who will happily pay you cash directly in 2024. Find me a way to get your finances in order without a bank that then has to respect laws surrounding transactions.

The fact we can't obfuscate cash purchases does not reduce the ability of your government to deny you access to your money in a bank.

Afaik drug deals are often done cash, so as long as that market exist cash won't disappear I believe.

An interesting facet of this that makes me feel somewhat more charitable to cashless payments in that context is that it's very easy to perform cashless payments in Japan pseudoanonymously, in that you can buy an IC card from a vending machine, load it with cash, and use it for payments all without explicit links to your KYC'd banking identity. Sure, if you attracted individualized security state attention they could probably pull security camera footage and figure it out, but that approach doesn't scale into turnkey tyrrany; sort of how like $5 wrench cryptanalysis doesn't prevent widespread strong cryptography fundamentally altering the envelope of what kinds of automated, at-scale privacy abuses are possible.

This is a fairly stark contrast with the West, where pseudoanonymous cashless payments basically don't exist. The closest thing (stuff like xmr aside, where the chance you can use it to buy a coffee is very low) are prepaid visa gift cards, but the UX on these is terrible for a lot of reasons and so aren't anywhere close to the practical usability of cash-charged IC cards in Japan.

Japan’s government is also pushing towards cashless society right now. Younger generations are accepting it as well. My friends at PayPay and similar companies are pretty set on increasing their userbases YoY.

I live in Canada, and honestly, nobody in any of my circles carry cash. The only use cases I can think of ate casinos and drugs. All the comments about “privacy, freedom and etc.” sounds like noise, and highly unlikely for younger people to even care about.

Cash is progressively disappearing, in particular as PayPay has gotten foothold.

The main gaps that were filled:

- interpersonal payment is now easy. 10 people eat together, splitting the bill is now sharing a QR code and 30s of operation for each, no exchange of contact, nothing finicky, and it can also be done later (no tap needed)

- phone networks are fast enough to make the transactions near instaneous. We're talking 3s at most in a sheet mobile environment. 1s with a wired POS.

- phone are secure enough, being already the central part of our electronic life.

All in all, cash will always be used somewhere, but even grandma's vegetable stands are starting to accept QR codes.

Here in Canada, Metro Vancouver implemented a tap payment system with gates for its transit system about ten years ago.

They started by generating outrage about fare evaders (the previous system was an "honor" based proof of payment, at least for the train). They claimed to be losing ~3 million $CAD yearly to fare evasion.

Then they made a plan to retrofit all the train stations with fare gates, and get new machines for the buses. The cost of this work was ~100 million $CAD.

I thought, well that will take some time to amortize. Then I learned that the maintenance cost of all this extra crap in the stations was on the order of $3 million/year. Clearly it was never about fare evasion.

You can buy a card with cash, and charge it with cash at machines in the stations, but there are strong incentives to link your account with a credit card.

The truth was confirmed several years later when I read an article in a local paper quoting someone at Translink who said their policy is to share trip data with police on request, without a warrant.

> Cash is cumbersome and annoying.

So is freedom. Tech that robs us of freedom offers ease of use or extra "free as in beer" services.

Monero?

> I wish there was a digital anonymous replacement.

There are, for instance GNU Taler: <https://taler.net/>. But what you want is an implemented system of digital anonymous cash. And that’s a whole other kettle of fish, since basically everybody actually in a position to implement such a system is incentivized to do it in a way which minimizes privacy.

Money-less society with security to stop hoarders looting stores.

All digital security ends up security through obscurity; encrypt with noise the data along some algorithmic path to obscure what the data is, divide up go has admin and tier their access to obscure who is needed for what.

There still needs to be someone with full control over the AWS account or whatever to grant further permission. There’s no perfect system security and anonymity if someone out there can drill in and use admin/keys to unwrap things.

That’s why governments like CEOs and root nodes on such groups; keeps surface area for getting what they want small.

Nearly all of my cash use, by dollar count, is paying service folks (home repair stuff, cleaners) who prefer payment in cash to evade taxes. I very rarely use cash for any other reason, and it’s always tiny amounts when I do.

XMR is probably your best bet for privacy digital currency.

That said XMR isn't stable like the USD is, but it also didn't have infinite printability as once market cap is reached then only tail emmisions are rewarded for mining....iirc that a set value of 20.

XMR is the best for privacy, is resistant to asic mining and GPU mining, and is a time proven crypto. That said if your just using it so you can gain money from price fluctuations and not because of the fiction the coin provides then your never going to realise it's true value.

It has come to the point that I switched to a wallet that I can put 1 or 2 bills in at most before it becomes cumbersome. I just keep a $20 in it for the once or twice a month I don’t just use card.

I get the privacy issues, but in this particular case the convenience far outweighs it. I honestly sometimes get annoyed when I go to a cash only place and often just don’t go.

There's fees for handling cash as well. They're just less obvious.

In the old days, those armoured vans used to have to go to stores every single day at peak times (Xmas, etc.). Plus you've got to pay for bags of change to be delivered. You've got to pay for a safe, insurance for your safe, plus a hard limit that safe is allowed to hold. If you're going to go over you need to request an on demand pickup from the cash people. You've got to have people in store collecting the cash, accounting it, trying to catch embezzlement, the cost of embezzlement, etc.

All those costs were added on to the cost of goods.

I used to work in the industry in the 90s, can't remember what any of that cost now, but I reckon it's comparable to the card merchant fees.

Yes, the present duopoly is taking the piss with their fees, but accepting cash is also expensive.

Why is it easier to raise prices/fees/tip % with cashless vs cash payments ?

You don't have to be dumb to get buried- just being poor is enough. Credit cards very much favor the well-off.

Well, you know, win on the germ front, lose on the independence front.

These are worst-case scenarios worth considering, but IMO an obvious one not being discussed enough: credit cards are great if you're wealthy, horrible if you're poor.

Between fees, absurd penalties for missed payments, and horrible rates if you don't have great credit- credit cards fleece the most vulnerable in our society while granting sweet perks to those with plenty.

Cash is a poor person's best way to opt-out.

If I, for example, would have been a regular guest in that place and they would go cashless, I would politely let the owner know that I won't be visiting them until they accept cash payments again.

You Americans get a lot of it back via card reward programs (or, if your credit is bad, via lower interest rates). In Europe the CC fees are limited to 0.3%, but there is also basically no cashback.

This is the case in a lot of countries too. I don't think I've used cash at all in 4-5 years and rarely in the last 10 years.

coincidentally during this time Canadian government has announced draconian ordinance to freeze bank accounts of citizens it deems unruly, destroy their credit history, call in loan payments.

Not only that new ordinances to stifle online speech it deems hateful retroactively meaning if you wrote nasty things about say Defense minister Sajjan that instructed special forces to rescue Afghan Sikhs during fall of Kabul leaving Canadians stranded, you could very well find yourself homeless in Canada.

Very scary and a big reason why Canadians young and old are creating US bank accounts and earning US dollars.

Canadian here, lots of business only take cash. We care about our privacy, although it's rare to find say a grocery store or gas station that doesn't accept cards too.

There are a lot of cashless options but many places still only take cash. There’s a bakery in building that opened right when COVID started and they’re strictly cash only. Whenever friends and relatives visit they’re always stunned.

My local coffee shop wont accept cards or digital payments, and they do it to help keep cash in society. We are too lazy with cards, but I guess it prevents another 'Northern Rock' style bank run, what's the point of rushing to take your cash out during the next financial crisis if you cant spend it. Already EUR cash transactions are limited to 1000. I often wonder how long before a bank account and smart phone become a legal requirement.

Why is cash embarrassing for you?

Because, through intention or error, a government or bank can lock out your accounts, leaving you penniless to pay bills or buy food.

There's a debit card system in Canada called Interac that should be free, but depending on the bank and account type, the bank will give you a very limited number of transactions per month (like 10 or 20). After that, every time you use your card you get charged a significant fee.

Canadians get ridiculously nickel-and-dimed by banks, telecoms, retail, etc, compared to most other countries, which is part of why our cost of living is ridiculously high.

Not credit card fees, bank fees. Almost every bank account in Canada has some sort of monthly service fees associated with them. You need to have a considerable amount of wealth accumulated in order for those fees to be waived. If my understanding of how Europeans bank is correct, such fees aren't as common.