Canada’s sovereignty call-to-arms has largely been expressed through what we buy. Shoppers fiercely scrutinize labels and corporate ownership to determine whether a product is truly “Canadian.” But while we’re paying closer attention to the origin and composition of the products we’re purchasing, we’re not really thinking about how we pay for them. That needs to change.
Kimberly Prost probably thinks about it every day. The Canadian International Criminal Court judge has been sanctioned by the Donald Trump administration since August 2025 for authorizing investigations into alleged war crimes by American personnel in Afghanistan, as well as cases related to Israel’s conduct in Gaza. Those sanctions mean that when Prost goes on vacation, she needs to phone hotels in advance to explain why she can’t pay for her stay with a credit card.
Prost is navigating a financial shadow ban because global commerce moves through an Americanized network. In 2025, Visa and Mastercard controlled 96 percent of Canada’s credit card market. We have a strong domestic debit system with Interac, but even that independence is eroding: Visa and Mastercard have partnered with Interac on co-badged cards, while many consumers pay with Apple-issued iPhones or use terminals run by American companies, such as Chase, Global Payments, Square, and Stripe.
A system that inconveniences a judge today could, in theory, be turned against a whole country tomorrow. The United Kingdom is reportedly exploring a national alternative to Visa and Mastercard over fears Trump could use United States–owned payment providers to freeze its economy. European officials have warned the continent is dangerously exposed to such coercion.
All of that money/interest bullshit should be thrown by the wayside so we can get on with progress again. We got stuck in a profit loop somehow.
Yankee here.
Please, for the love of fuck, ditch them as fast as you feasibly can. Money is the only language my government speaks. Don’t you dare be a scab! The sane ones are counting on you! Don’t worry about us, we’ll be fine. The sooner we all can starve them out financially, the sooner we can overthrow them!
'Member when the answer to headline questions was always no? I 'member.
This one is definitely a yes. Ditto for every other bit of American digital monopoly.
The answer is yes, we should be decoupling from the US as much as possible economically. If the government needs to create a crown corp to do it then let’s get it done.
Every time this is brought up people cry Europe, but there are countries out there that already got rid of visa and mastercard, and almost killed paper in the process. Like India’s UPI and Brazil’s Pix, this last, in a time spam shorter than 5 years from it becoming fully operational.
In the case of the Brazilian Pix, it appears that they are considering agreements to connect it with platforms across the world, like with Italy, as reported here https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-02-27/brazil-takes-its-central-bank-digital-payments-app-pix-across-borders (https://archive.is/8SnmL)
The cherry on the cake: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pix_(payment_system)#United_States_government_investigation
Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has accused US president Donald Trump of being “bothered by Pix” because it “will put an end to credit cards”
We have Interac. Very few places don’t take it.
Co-badged cards have always existed since the beginning of Interac. Any card from PRE-Interac would have had Plus, Maestro or Cirrus co-badging. That’s not new. Your debit card also being usable as a credit card in no way takes away from what Interac does.
I have had an VISA debit for something like 15 years. I got one almost immediately after they became available. I don’t think I have used it as a credit card maybe ever. Interac only.
The only thing we don’t have at scale is credit run through Interac. If we allowed revolving credit, it would operate exactly the same as a credit card, but that’s currently not allowed.
The other thing is just that people love credit card rewards.
Obviously, the rewards come out of the cut that the CC processors take from the merchants, so it’s not really free, but at this point, if you use debit instead of credit, you’re just paying more for no reason. It will take a big momentum shift of stores refusing to accept credit cards before debit takes over in Canada. Even now, I’ve seen stores who charge 50 cents to use any type of card under a minimum value, whether it’s debit or credit. While that encourages cash for small purchases, it does nothing to encourage debit, which would be significantly cheaper for merchants.
you’re just paying more for no reason
You are basically paying the credit card fees for not using a card. It is a protection racket. “It’d be a shame if you didn’t use our credit card and had to pay extra due to card processing fees”.
We should do what the EU did. Clamp card fees to a small value so that they can’t meaningfully offer customers rewards which creates this twisted incentive.
Or stores just make the customer pay (most of) the card fees. As you said lots of smaller stores do this and I’m more than happy to pay with debit.
There are actually laws in some places in Canada against providing different pricing based on payment method. I worked at a store years ago that gave discounts for random things that were not payment methods that coincidentally only applied to people who paid cash.
The rewards thing, I run things through my credit card because of that. The only thing that the CC company makes money off of me directly for is the yearly charge.
There are actually laws in some places in Canada against providing different pricing based on payment method
I don’t think there’s any laws against this. What I found specifically says:
Under the Code of Conduct for the Payment Card Industry in Canada, you may choose to offer discounts for different payment methods and between different payment card networks.
I know that historically, Visa and Mastercard have prohibited merchants from charging fees for using a credit card, but couldn’t do anything about offering discounts if they didn’t use a credit card. I believe they removed that from their merchant agreements a while ago, because it was mostly performative, and I don’t think they enforced it very well.
I was specifically referring to charging a fee for using a credit card. But that apparently went away in 2022.
I dumped reward cards because they began to show no added value and many required an annual fee that erased the reward benefit. With TD points (as one example) as you reached a point level they’d remove those awards out of your options and show you awards outside of your bracket. I had to do some cookie trckery to get rewarded.
West jet dollars now became points so it’s not a dollar for dollar payback now.
There are plenty of credit cards with rewards and no fees, and some (like TD) have no fees conditionally if you meet a certain minimum balance threshold.
I’ve always just done cashback rewards though. I know it’s theoretically “worse” than points, value-wise, but they can’t change how much a dollar is worth, just the percentage (which they’ve never done to me yet).
Not to mention insane interest rates.
IDK if it’s available in Canada but you might want to check out the Fidelity rewards card. It shoves 2% into your Fidelity investment account each quarter. No fees, no fuss, no faffing around with points and tiers and other bullshit.
I mean that could seem good if you spend enough to cover yearly fee, however there is no free money; that 2% they give you is from their profit of charging merchants a larger percent to use the credit system, and that merchant passes that cost onto you with higher prices. So say a 4% merchant increase and we’d get 2% back of overpaying.
There is no annual fee. I only use it at places where there is no surcharge for using a credit card. And this is only worthwhile if you pay it off every month so you aren’t paying interest.
You’re right that there is no free money and it is a cut of the merchant fees. It’s kinda fucked because places that charge the same for cash and credit have to charge more to cover the merchant fees and then people with good credit and good credit cards get a kickback while everyone else pays the inflated prices or even worse, get hit with ripoff fees and interest.
I try to use cash or debit at small local businesses so they aren’t getting slammed with fees, but places like that are usually pretty quick to add surcharges for credit cards.
Side note, in the US the CC companies used to be able to refuse to do business with anyone who charged a different price for cash vs credit. Since losing the ability to take payments via Visa or Master Card would be super detrimental to most businesses, only the most under the radar mom and pop shops added CC surcharges. There was a recent court case where this was basically struck down so now we’re seeing CC surcharges getting added on at all kinds of places. We seem to be in a weird transition but I think this will eventually get us away from this situation where poor people end up subsidizing the credit card rewards for rich people.
Now stores were lobbying for surge pricing , Ugghhh
If we allowed revolving credit, it would operate exactly the same as a credit card, but that’s currently not allowed.
It would cut into a multi-trillion dollar market for short term credit. No way “Business Friendly” MPs would allow that.
Yes and have something that is compatible with Europe, please!
Yes, yes and yes again.
A Canadian-only solution isn’t really all that useful. Part of what makes Visa and Mastercard useful is that they work around the world. This also means that they have datacenters around the world that are built in a redundant way so that even if one is destroyed by terrorism or a natural disaster, the remainder will take over the load. Meanwhile Interac failed in 2022 because their only service provider was Rogers, which went down.
I don’t know why there are no Interac credit cards. Visa doesn’t issue credit, it’s just the payment processor attached to the bank’s credit card. It seems like theoretically it should be possible to have a credit card with multiple payment processors attached. I seem to remember there used to be cards that had Cirrus, Plus and maybe also Maestro on them. You could just have a credit card with a priority list of processors attached. Try interac first, if that’s not supported fall back to visa.
It’s probably not done that way because the big companies are willing to spend money to prevent it. I would bet that Visa and Mastercard require that any card where they’re a payment processor is one where they’re the exclusive payment processor. Canada could probably pass a law that exclusive cards weren’t legal. But, Visa and Mastercard would probably use their billions to lobby to prevent a law like that from passing.
An agreement between EU/CPTPP and MERCOSUR members to recognize credit card’s created in each members countries that of course meet stringent standards, could be possible. I mean if VISA and Mastercard could do it, why not cards created in other countries? I mean it’s a lot of work but the alternative is the status quo where the US shuts down your access when you do something they don’t like.
their service provider was Rogers
Well that right there is your problem
Rogers is -by far and far- the worst provider bthst has ever existed. If you host something there, it’s on you.
The company I work at still has a lot hosted there and it’s laughably bad
3 ovh servers with a total cost of 700 dollars gives me 10 times the amount of hardware (ram, storage) at about 10 times the speed (100MB/s write speeds at Rogers, 1600MB/s on Rogers AFTER the encryption layer, so absolute speeds are probably still twice higher than that) for 10 times less the cost (Rogers does 7000/month)
The Rogers team once upgraded a 5 server farm from Windows 2012 to 2019 and took 1 year and 4 months to complete this
Random half hour downtimes are a weekly tradition, especially about a year ago
Sometimes they just accidentally disconnect servers to the point where the filesystems get so corrupted that it’s irrecoverable. Multiple times
Rogers happily overcharges almost double for months, hoping you won’t notice
And most of our servers are still there. Don’t ask why I don’t know, it’s dumb
I think you’re missing the bigger issue. They exclusively used rogers. They had a single point of failure. That single point of failure happened to be Rogers, but it would eventually have caused a problem if their ISP had been a different one. This was a national card processor serving 30+ million people.
You lack imagination.
why not just join forces with the eu on this
Because Canada already has interac, we have a solution to tell MC and Visa to fuck right off.
We need a global solution. If I want to buy from a canadian company as a EU citizen, I can’t use your local interac.
GNU Taler would be a good global solution. It’s an anonymous (for the buyer) digital cash. Do far its been adopted by some swiss banks.
There’s more info on it over at !money@slrpnk.net
Yes, you can. Interac and INTUR are technically interoperable.
I had no idea that interac was Canadian. Learn something new every day
Thats a good start but who knows maybe one day the EU will turn on us too (not likely but a few years ago I would have found it extremely unlikely that the US would threaten to annex us, too). The safest solution is one that’s homegrown
Yes, just do it !
Yes.
Products like Interac Konek provide financial institutions with the ability to have a fully Canadian payment stack already, and online functionality with a more traditional debit card - from what I understand, it’s basically an ISO20022 compliant setup that bypasses the larger international payment networks/settlement approaches, allowing Point of Sale systems to communicate directly with banking system providers/financial institutions (for older models, POS purchases go through payment networks that are usually US based – for CC’s they add in another layer for the funding). To turn that into a credit card, it just needs to get connected to a bank account with a line of credit on it, the technology is pretty simple, and arguably available today.
Bigger rub is likely our regulatory environment and the risk allowances that the government permits FIs to take within Canada. Every bank/credit union is heavily pressured into having real estate as a security for all credit/loans – because the govt views it as the ‘safest’ security, and therefore the only one they accept without punishing organisations for “taking too much risk”. Go back to the boomer / gen X days, and it was incredibly common to get a ‘small’ “signature loan” from a local community credit union – like 10-25k in funding, based on a signed doc saying you promise to pay it back, with the security being just your word.
If the regulators changed their risk tolerance to allow FIs to serve retail credit customers more in Canada, and Interac was cool with konek connecting up to accounts with LOCs, this sort of thing ‘could’ roll out super easily/quick. A local community credit union could get you setup with a signature loan for your credit limit / interest rate, connect the interac konek card up to that account, and you could use it online just like a credit card. They could even tie that package to a Home Equity LOC for a lower rate, if the person has that security available – basically ‘building in’ some better debt consolidation than traditional cards.
That won’t likely happen though, especially with the market all in the shitter at present. The regs are watching housing flatline due to things the gov has done – such as an over-reliance on immigration and international trade, both of which went splat in 2024-2025, after already suffering heavy issues during 2020-2022 due to COVID. So the one security they ‘thought’ was super safe, is floundering – they aren’t likely to open up ‘higher risk’ options as a result. The fintechs will likely circumvent all regulation, as that’s basically their role at this point – they come in to the banking market, and declare they can do all sorts of things that are against banking regulations, then they pretend they aren’t banks and get to avoid those regulations entirely. They play by completely different rules, which they tend to set themselves, yet compete for market share with existing players who are limited by gov restrictions. Sorta like how Uber/AirBNB comes in as an illegal taxi company/illegal hotel services, but rather than being banned/fined to non-existence, instead we just change laws to make it sorta legal. Any attempt to regulate them, meets push back from US interests, where the vast majority of these companies are based/funded. You’re more likely to end up with a Google/Apple-Credit account, because they won’t care about Canada’s laws, and Canada can’t stop them from introducing these sorts of higher risk products.
And as for the whole foreign dominance of the financial space – it’s completely captured. The regulators are 100% reliant on US tech companies, with people like the BC FSA hosting their operating environment in MS Cloud, requiring all industry players to submit detailed personal information reports about borrowers into that space for ‘oversight’ and ‘risk management’ purposes. The FSA literally cannot regulate BC’s financial services to avoid US tech, because the regulators themselves are wholly captured. BC’s regulators have openly stated they think we should have just 4 or so credit unions in the province, and has been taking steps for the past 10-15 years to achieve that goal by smothering / forcing smaller credit unions to merge. Look at something like the BC Rent bank – a $21 million dollar hand out by BC’s government to Vancity, the largest CU in the province, to provide rent-assistance to communities across the province. A service need that would previously be met ‘naturally’ (without huge investments from gov) by small community credit unions, the gov instead funded the biggest, giving Vancity a leg-up in eroding small CU markets / value propositions. Vancity’s also been in the news, saying they’re gonna abandon that whole thing if the gov doesn’t continue funding them – the govs approach pretty much eliminated that financial assistance option for small communities, and worsened the playing field for individuals. BC has only 1 credit union that I know of, that is open bond (open to the public), with its banking system made in Canada, by a Canadian company, using Canadian developers, and hosted on a Canadian cloud. Only 1, and it’s likely gonna go poof in the near future is my bet, cause it isn’t really ‘marketed’ that way, and there’s not enough interest in this sort of thing for people to give a shit.
Just piggyback on the EU effort.
Is Canada going to stop using Apple, Google, Microsoft (Linkedin, Windows, Office, Teams, etc.), Amazon (AWS + e-commerce), and whatever else not even including those payment processors? After over a year the answer is no, so “should” but probably won’t.
Btw a US private equity firm just bought the last big high-tech company in Calgary.
See the list for yourself: https://www.calgaryeconomicdevelopment.com/assets/Uploads/2024-Calgary-Company-List-by-Revenue.pdf
It’s going to be a slow process, but I don’t think the geopolitical chaos is going to die down soon, and every time America does something it gives the effort a shot in the arm.
Alternatives for everything on that list besides Amazon seem to exist already.
Quite unlikely when Canada has been increasing the share of CPP invested in the US just for example.
