Photo by Michelle Spollen

Back in April, a friend and I had met up to grab smoothies at a café before going on a lockdown walk.

We each ordered, and I pulled out my debit card to pay. “Sorry, cash only,” said the woman behind the counter. I stared blankly at her, then my friend. “I don’t have any cash,” I said; my friend confirmed that she didn’t either. We apologized to the woman, then made our way to another café that took cards.

Even before the pandemic, Canada had been trending toward becoming a cash-free society: cash transactions have been declining steadily since 2011, when contactless debit and credit (i.e. tap) first gained popularity. While two-thirds of Canadians reported using contactless credit or debit in 2018, 90 percent of unbanked people (meaning those who have no relationship to a bank) report using cash.

Since the start of the pandemic, many businesses started banning cash transactions due to concerns about it being a nesting ground for the COVID-19 virus. A new report by FIS Global, an international FinTech company that uses technology to better engage in financial markets, states that since the COVID-19 pandemic began, cash transactions have declined by more than half. It also states that FIS Global expects cash to be used for only four percent of in-store payments by 2024.

It seems like very few banked people I know use cash these days. The friend that I had been walking with said she hadn’t taken cash out of an ATM since March 2020, before the pandemic—something I realized was true for me too, after thinking about it.

With what seems like the imminent death of cash, sped up by the COVID-19 pandemic, I wonder if the things we give cash to, being mainly small businesses and each other, will also disappear. As some of us adapt, who might get left behind?

The history of widespread cash use is a relatively short one. Standardized currency was first implemented in some regions of the world in the Axial Age, from 800 to 300 BCE, then again after periods of disuse in East Asia and Europe during the 15th century. Before its employment, people would use whatever was relatively abundant around them as a surrogate, like metal nails or cod, or would run up personal credits with each other’s businesses.

The second attempt to introduce a mass standardized currency coincided with the advent of capitalism in the 16th century. Adam Smith, a prominent economist of the 18th century, believed that it would be advantageous for a country to bring everyday transactions into a uniform currency, and to abandon the practice of mercantilism, which involved the crown accumulating as much bullion (gold or silver, before coining) as it could.

As the colonial exploits of Spain and Portugal brought massive amounts of silver into the European economy, it became more possible to regulate currency, and to remunerate everyone with the same reward. Near the same time, standardized paper money, backed by bullion, became more common, and was another means to regulate transactions.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, central banks increasingly assumed control of printing paper money.
In Canada, Indigenous people had longstanding practices of trading, using items of copper, precious metals, and furs as the basis of a currency. Early settlers used a variety of items as currency, including playing cards with royal stamps, French and Spanish silver coins, the British pound, Nova Scotian money (a currency used in Nova Scotia until 1871), American money and “army bills,” before a standardized Canadian currency eventually became more circulated in the decades after confederation.

The many types of currencies meant that money had many forms up until the 20th century. Money then became pretty standardized, with cash as the main method of payment, until two new forms of payment were introduced in Canada: credit in 1968 and debit in 1988. It took a while for debit to catch on, though, and it wasn’t until 1994 that it was offered by all banks and accepted by retailers in every province.
By 2009, however, cash accounted for only 54 percent of transactions, and this dropped to 33 percent by 2017.

The question then is, who uses cash these days? In the U.S., 55 percent of small businesses don’t accept credit cards. In a study conducted in Canada in 2008, 93 percent of businesses accepted debit, while 92 percent accepted credit, and all accepted cash.

Many small businesses prefer cash because they don’t incur processing surcharges. Salon SLiJ, a longtime hairdressing salon in Montreal, used to accept cash and e-transfers but began accepting only e-transfers during the waves of the COVID-19 pandemic. Oleg, the manager of the salon, who prefers to go by first name only, says that, like many salons through the pandemic, “our sales were down more than fifty percent.”

Nikhil Tangirala, an urban planner who lives in Montreal, says that he stopped using cash during the pandemic due to hygiene reasons. “I don’t use much cash anyway, but I definitely began using less during COVID,” he says. “I stopped going to my local depanneur,” which is cash-predominant and accepts debit with surcharges, he adds.

Beyond small businesses, those who predominantly use cash tend to be those on the lower end of the socio-economic scale. In Canada, three percent of Canadians, the equivalent of over one million people, are unbanked and 15 percent of Canadians, or nearly five million people, are underbanked, meaning that they have no or limited access to credit and debit for a variety of reasons, such as having a poor credit score or living in a location underserviced by banks. Correspondingly, proportional to those who are unbanked or underbanked, 15 percent of Canadians report being heavy cash users.

Étienne, who prefers to go by first name only, is an unbanked person living in Montreal who is also unhoused. His primary income is obtained through asking people on the streets for money. “It was tough, it was really tough,” Étienne says, in reference to his income during the pandemic. “It’s been tough now too, but it’s been better since COVID … More and more people use debit cards now instead of cash … they say ‘sorry, I only have debit.’”

As of 2019, cash transactions accounted for 21 percent of all transaction volume, and 80 percent of Canadians reported making at least one cash transaction per week. Of those 80 percent, over half reported giving cash to people (rather than using it for purchases) through the week.

As cash is increasingly fading out, a new player in the game, cryptocurrency, has been entering circulation, digital coin by digital coin. Cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, have no physical form at all and can only be used for online transactions, which are processed in a decentralized fashion by brokers who cash in on every trade. Cryptocurrencies typically have finite quantities of money which ensures that the currency doesn’t lose value. This differs from physical currencies, which are protected by interest rates.

The latest figures available on cryptocurrency usage in Canada are from 2019, when it was reported that nearly four percent of Canadians were using bitcoin, and close to one percent were using the next most popular cryptocurrency, Ethereum. In 2016, 64 percent of Canadians were aware of Bitcoin, and this percentage jumped to 85 percent in 2017.

While cryptocurrency circulation is growing, increasing pressure on central banks to create their own digital currencies to facilitate transactions, in their current private form they present significant barriers to access. For one, the limited quantity of cryptocurrencies mean that they are very expensive; at the time of writing, for example, one bitcoin is equivalent to $47,784 CAD. Another major issue is that cryptocurrency transactions are expensive, with bitcoin transactions costing nearly $60 in April 2021.

Cryptocurrencies also are also uniquely digital currencies, meaning that they are again reserved for those who choose or are able to process electronic payments. Even though there were nearly 900 Bitcoin ATMs in Canada as of 2020, these only service people who want to trade in physical currency for bitcoin, not the other way around.

Professor Matt Tiessen researches digital economy at Ryerson University. He thinks that cryptocurrencies are on the rise because they can potentially circulate money quicker. “Money likes to move,” he says, “and the liquidity of cryptocurrencies permits that.” At the same time, he agrees that the cost and means of processing private cryptocurrencies present significant barriers of access. “It’s prohibitive,” he says.
Tiessen is wary, however, of the concept of a central bank-produced digital currency, thinking that it could create significant and novel annexations of economic control. “[A national cryptocurrency] would create a system of surveillance and power,” Tiessen says. “Cash just sits around.”

“Part of the allure for government in creating a national cryptocurrency would be that it could be quickly distributed, and then also expire, which would ensure that it was always being spent.” (This comes up while he is speaking about a potential Universal Basic Income issued by the government.) A national digital currency could then side-step some of the barriers to access of private cryptocurrencies, but could also reduce autonomy. “It could limit your financial freedom,” Tiessen says.

As we slowly transition out of the COVID-19 pandemic, into a version of life that involves touching, hugging, filtering between stores and homes, and feeling near to the people and things we care about, where will we go with cash? Back before the loonie, we had lots of different forms of money, but these had widespread circulation within localized communities, and, within these communities, had relative accessibility, despite general inequality.

Contactless tap might run in the same vein of magic as buying physical goods with invisible currency, or of “mining” intangible bounty. Cash, though, links us to a current, a common denominator, of which we are all a part.

At least, that was the message that emerged from December’s “pension summit” in Whitehorse, where finance ministers and senior government officials from across Canada met to formulate a response to the failure of Canada’s baby boomers to adequately prepare for their own retirement. A turbulent decade in the equity markets, a marked decline in the number of private-sector pension plans, and an unwillingness or inability on boomers’ part to save enough means many members of Canada’s biggest generation face retirement years that may not exactly be golden. But while there are ideological and political differences of opinion on how this apparent crisis ought to be addressed, one thing was clear: the en masse retirement of the boomers presents a huge challenge that is still going untended.

Right now, Canada has one of the more generous government benefit plans in the world, with the combined income from the Canada Pension Plan, Old Age Security, and the Guaranteed Income Supplement totalling as much as $36,000 per couple, or $19,000 per person as of 2009. Improving the lot of Canada’s retirees is a worthy goal, and the question of retirement income deserves closer study given the virtual disappearance of defined benefit pension plans in the private sector and the sorry fact that bankrupt companies’ pension recipients are among the last to be paid when creditors come to collect—as ex-employees of Nortel recently learned.

But there is something wrong if improving today’s pensions means saddling tomorrow’s workers with the bill—a very real possibility when it comes to pension reform. One of the most popular solutions floated in Whitehorse was a significant increase in contributions to the Canada Pension Plan in order to pay for the imminent bulge of retirees. One scenario would see employee contributions rise from 4.95 percent to eight percent, a 60 percent increase (and a 300 percent increase from the rates the boomers themselves paid for much of their working lives).

Harry Satanove, an actuary and pension advisor, worries that placing the burden of pension reform on young Canadians, many of whom are saddled with monstrous levels of student debt and all of whom suffer disproportionately from the consequences of a stiffening job market, is unfair. “We shouldn’t be relying on our kids and grandkids to pay for our pensions,” he said in a December 11, 2009, article on pension reform published in the Tyee. “There’s not enough of them to support all of us.” Unfortunately, that appears to be precisely the plan, and not just when it comes to pension reform, either. The federal and provincial governments failed to anticipate the crunch, and the shortfall will have to be covered by the next generation of taxpayers. Thanks to a declining birth rate, the number of elderly Canadians has been on the rise for some time and that figure will peak in the next 30 years as the “dependency ratio”—the number of workers for every non-working adult—falls from five-to-one today to twoto-one by 2040. One study from early 2009 estimated that pension, health care, and other senior-related programs will cost $1.5 trillion over the next 50 years. Rising costs and falling revenues—partly owing to new debt from 2009’s stimulus spending—are a toxic combination. Yet there has been no national conversation of any significance, no meeting of provincial and federal ministers, and no sense of urgency about how Canada will fund this massive liability.

In view of these facts, the recent panic over the state of Canada’s retirement infrastructure establishes a worrying precedent. Those speaking on behalf of Canada’s baby boomers prefer to frame the retirement issue as an effort to improve the post-work prospects for all future generations, but the timing of its arrival on the national stage betrays that elegant smokescreen: It is no coincidence that retirement-related issues suddenly became a pressing national concern as the first baby boomers began to collect retirement benefits—just as it won’t be when health care, assisted suicide, and other senior-related issues become pressing concerns in their own time.

That’s not to attribute malicious motives to the boomers, but instead to acknowledge their demographic dominance simply overwhelms the agendas of other constituencies. Federal and provincial politicians have reacted to the concerns of Canada’s largest generation with a degree of responsiveness unheard of on files like student debt or the environment. And it isn’t surprising that the boomers have the ear of policy-makers, given both their numbers and their relative enthusiasm for voting. But privileging the interests of one demographic over those of another is a recipe for conflict. Younger Canadians can only hope that the politics of the next 40 years isn’t defined by it.

Noam Chomsky in "Encirclement: Neo-Liberalism Ensnares Democracy"

If ever there was a conspiracy theory that had every likelihood of being true, it’s that a shadowy cabal of billionaires are meeting at some remote location in the Swiss Alps (perhaps the Hotel Mont Pelerin, or the latest Bilderberg stronghold) to plot how to most effectively screw the rest of the world. Michael Moore’s new film Capitalism: A Love Story may have garnered the most attention this season for taking aim at the secret practices and predations of the super wealthy, but recently, an entire swathe of films has appeared that shine the light on the moneyed elite and their economic empire.

Erwin Wagenhofer’s Let’s Make Money, Leslie Cockburn’s American Casino, Renzo Martens’ Episode 3—Enjoy Poverty, Kevin Stocklin’s We All Fall Down, and Richard Brouillette’s three hour epic Encirclement: Neo-Liberalism Ensnares Democracy have all been released within the past year, and have popped up at film festivals around the globe.

Although this glut might appear to be a reaction to the current global money meltdown, many of the films were many years in the making—especially Brouillette’s, which took more than 12 years to create. That they should all should emerge roughly at the same time is serendipitous. (Or maybe it speaks to some even larger invisible hand at work.)

The one percent (or less) of the population that comprise the wealthiest demographic on the planet are different from the rest of us. Perhaps, much like the poor, they’ve always been with us, but never before in the history of human society has the entire collected wealth of the world, been so densely concentrated. How exactly did it come to be?

It may a simple enough question, but the answers are Byzantine in their complexity. There is simply too much to know, too many details filling the air with smoke and flying pieces of paper.

Nowhere is this more evident than in Brouillette’s film Encirclement, which is not even really so much a film as a lecture series. Even the title sounds like a treatise. All the same, if you can keep your eyes propped open, it may be one of the most chilling films in recent memory.

The film is divided into chapters, which is actually the best way to watch it. Take in some information, then go have a cup of tea before you dive back into dense stuff like “Chapter 8: Neo-Liberalism or Neo-Colonialism? Strong-Arm Tactics of the Financial Markets,” in which Noam Chomsky demonstrates the ability of financial power brokers to make global political decisions.

As the varied talking heads lay out exactly how neo-liberalism sacrificed public good for private profit and economic meltdown resulted, a shadow world is revealed in which real power, pooled in liquidities and off-shore reserves, is massaged and manipulated by an army of financiers, analysts, and grey-suited think-tanks. This shadow government surpasses all borders and agencies, and ultimately serves only one master. If you were about to say Satan, you’re not far wrong. It’s the bottom line.

The one thing watching all of these films en masse can do is at least clear up any residual or lingering uncertainty about “us” and “them.” The rich are definitely out to get us, and they have the means (be it private security firms, or the entire American army) and the methodology (untaxable offshore bank accounts housed in the Isle of Guernsey) to do it.

But against such a gargantuan world-eating monstrosity, what can one possibly do, except—as in a bear attack—roll over and play dead?

I wish I had better answers, but after plowing through three hours of Encirclement, I felt utterly outflanked, outgunned and outmaneuvered. I’m sure most people would feel the same. The film does not end on an upbeat note; rather, the completeness of its argument squelches hope of resistance.

But before we collectively offer up our soft underbellies to the devouring maw, stop and think. Brouillette’s own stated intent for his documentary was to make “A film about mind-control, brainwashing, ideological conformism; about the omnipresent irrefutability of a new monotheism, with its engraved commandments, burning bushes and golden calves.”

Which all sounds rather biblical, but in the war against Mammon, perhaps, the symbolism is apt. The sense of religious convergence is similar to that of the conspiracy theory. The moment when you step over from denial to acceptance, and begin to believe that there is a bigger truth out there, everything shifts. In this guerrilla campaign, information is a weapon.

Documentaries, bless their stubborn contrary hearts, continue to be one of the few media forms that still squeak and squawk. Everything else has pretty much been bought up, silenced or infantilized into blithering stupidity (yes, I’m looking at you, mainstream media). Arm yourself with facts and arguments. Don’t trust anyone, especially not a man in a suit. Bankers, brokers, or real estate agents, are all in on it.

There’s a reason they call it free thinking. It may be the last free thing around.

Four of the country’s 16 medical schools admitted to accepting research-targeted grants between 1996 and 1999, and three said they accepted donations, which are not tied to specific research projects. The average grant was for more than $160,000, while the average donation came in at $18,000. “It’s not surprising that the tobacco industry gives money to medical schools,” says Joanna Cohen, the study’s principal researcher. “I am disappointed that the medical schools would actually take the money.”

The figures might actually be much higher considering five medical schools refused to disclose financial information.

Cohen can’t name the schools that admitted to accepting the cash because researchers promised respondents they would remain anonymous. “Anonymity is a common research practice as far as individuals are concerned, so we decided to extend this to the universities, to take all precautions to get the best results.”

None of the schools that participated in the study has a policy preventing it from accepting money from the tobacco industry. Cynthia Callard, executive director of Physicians for a Smoke-Free Canada, says that’s a huge problem and something medical schools have to change soon. “It was a little bit of a hidden issue,” says Callard. “But now it’s been brought to light and something should be done about it.”

In Australia, 70 percent of medical faculties have policies against accepting tobacco funds. Unfortunately, things do not seem to be moving very quickly here in Canada. Audrey Cheung, director of research grants at U of T, says the school has no policy regarding the acceptance of tobacco funding, nor does the university plan on adopting a ban. “I’m not aware of any move in that direction,” she says, “either at the university or at the faculty level.”

It’s true in some circles that taking an active interest in one’s finances is considered anathema to being truly left-leaning, that it’s a distasteful, bourgeois hobby. And if you’re making millions off investments in tobacco companies and weapons manufacturers, it probably is. But that isn’t always the case. The flipside of that argument is that taking control of one’s finances is the ultimate expression of self-determination.

Learning about personal finance should be of most interest to those who don’t have much of it—and in that category we can safely include the many people who work for low-paying NGOs, non-profits and charities. After all, do you think Belinda Stronach reads personal finance magazines? Hardly—she can pay someone to manage her money for her, whereas the rest of us need to learn to do it ourselves.

It’s easy to understand why many lefties find personal finance literature so odious, as much of it is written with the same underlying conservative philosophy—that you need to master your finances in order to pay the least amount of tax possible. Most lefties naturally, and rightfully, disagree with such a position. As supporters of a social welfare state, we realize that if we didn’t pay taxes there would be no such thing as universal health care.

My take is a little different: I think you should bone up on personal finance in order to pay the least amount of money possible to the multinational corporations that control your life. According to the latest information from Statistics Canada, the average Canadian family carries a rather astounding $12,300 in credit card and “other” debts, to say nothing of what we owe on mortgages ($82,800), student loans ($10,400), lines of credit ($13,500) and car loans ($11,200). That means big bucks in interest payments for banks and credit card companies. But why are so many of us giving them more money than we have to?

What’s your interest in keeping the big banks profitable, the same ones that shutter small-town branches they deem not profitable enough and charge increasingly higher service fees for fewer services? Or what about credit card companies that charge interest rates that are more than 15 percent higher than the Bank of Canada’s prime lending rate and insist on giving consumers more credit to spend than they can ever hope to pay off? Surely if the money you shell out in unnecessary interest payments stayed in your hands, you could find better ways to spend it than bolstering the bottom line of these multinational money-making machines.

The same thinking applies to investing. Yes, most of the literature you’ll find is couched in terms of making RRSP contributions as a way to reduce your so-called tax burden. But try to look past that. Because if you don’t learn how to invest properly, and simply pour money into an ethical fund, you may end up more philosophically compromised than if you’d just bought a regular mutual fund. The fund manager’s idea of what is ethical may be quite different from yours. If you don’t learn what to look for, you won’t know what your money supports.

Last year, Bill C-24 placed new spending limits on nomination races and new reporting requirements on donations. It also introduced new limits on donations, including a ban on corporate donations to parties, a $1,000 limit on corporate donations to candidates and a $5,000 limit on individuals donating to parties or candidates. But donors are still finding ways to get around the rules.

Re-elected Liberal MP Carolyn Parrish, for example, was offered a cheque for $5,000 from a company in her riding. Knowing this was above the $1,000 limit for businesses, she politely returned the cheque. But almost immediately after she did so, three new $1,000 cheques came in: one from the company that wrote the first cheque, one from the owner of the company and one from another company the owner was involved in. A few weeks later, she got a $2,000 cheque from the owner’s brother. “The first guy would have liked to have given me $5,000, but he couldn’t,” she says.

In the Ottawa Centre race, Liberal Richard Mahoney’s campaign called voters on election day—when campaigning is illegal—leaving an automated message propagating a false rumour that his main opponent, the NDP’s Ed Broadbent, was willing to give up his seat if Jack Layton lost his own election and needed somewhere to run. “The people of Ottawa Centre can elect someone who’s committed for the long term, Richard Mahoney, and prevent Stephen Harper from becoming prime minister,” the message urged.

Mahoney lost by a wide margin, but the incident illustrates how election laws are failing to deal with desperate candidates who pull out the dirty tricks in the dying days of a campaign, confident in the knowledge that an Elections Canada investigation will not be able to stop them until after the election, when the damage is done. Nobody knows when the next election will be, but with any luck, MPs will address ways to prevent these shenanigans before another writ is dropped.