Jen, my neighbour, put a new three-piece into her old house last year. It was brutal. The building is ancient, built like a fort, and the contractor had to burrow through and around twelve-by-twelve main beams.
Wasn’t cheap. And Jen wasn’t fussed about making sure the renovator pays his taxes. Give me cash, he said, and it’ll be cheaper for you anyway. She did – $12,500 in hundreds she got from BeeMo on the corner (after ordering it a week in advance and signing a form saying the bank was not responsible if she got mugged).
Well, soon Jen would be party to a criminal act.
If Parliament passes Bill C-2 (and it will), legislation to toughen up the border and be harder on crime, then such a payment will be illegal. The provision is contained in a section (77.5) which makes paying for anything with ten grand in folding money a criminal act. The assumption is that only fentanyl dealers, free financial blog hosts and human traffickers walk around with that kind of money. Here it is:
But wait. What if this is part of a more sinister move to eradicate cash? After all, most people now buy almost everything with their phones, credit cards, e-transfer, online banking or through direct debit. That means every transaction is recorded, tracked and permanently stored – somewhere. Nothing is anonymous, personal or hidden. And some people worry that every time politicians move in to squish the use of cash it’s another step on the path to a central bank-issued digital currency.
And, yup, the Bank of Canada has been working on that.
“CBDC is the next step towards this government and the intended direction The One World Government has been heading,” blog dog Sandy insists. “Certainly with the amount of cell phones in the world today they could easily be the method of both personal identification and purchasing. What is your thoughts on CBDC and do you see it as ‘the mark of the beast’ as you wrote years ago?”
Well, it’s true. I did. Two years before the last paper Canadian dollar was printed, to be replaced by the loonie, people were talking wildly about the endangered future of cash. Almost forty years ago I wrote about one of the chief alarm-raisers, a bible-thumping American academic named Mary Stewart Relfe.
For a spell she was a thing. Electronic funds transfer, she said, “is designed to remove all money from individuals, but by doing so will eliminate all personal freedom and privacy.” Her vision of the future included all humans receiving a worldwide card with a barcode, replacing money. That would eventually be supplemented with an implanted chip (in your forehead). This would be the mark of the beast, 666, as detailed in Revelation 13, verses 16-18, she told her followers.
Any proof you might need, Relfe added, was the licence plate of Pierre Trudeau’s vintage Mercedes (ENB-666).
Just to remind me, Sandy sent this syndicated column, a clipping he saved from 1985 published in the Edmonton paper. Please note what great hair I had…
Well, critics are lining up to dump on C-2. The global conspiracists see it as a sneaky Mark Carney way to ensure Canadians are enslaved by the cabal that actually runs the world, with the goal of stripping you of all personal property, freedom of movement and individual choice. The tech guys and civil libertarians worry about how the bill would force social media platforms, email services, telecoms, cloud storage companies and others to disclose personal info on their clients and subscribers – without judicial order or oversight. A TikTok went around last night saying Ottawa wants the same mass deportation authority that Trump is using to tear up US society.
As for restricting cash transactions, there’s no doubt privacy and freedom from political snooping would be lessened. Is that an issue for people? Does anyone fuss about it anymore when they are so careless with personal data and hand over live credit cards to Amazon and their Apple wallet?
And what of Jen’s new ensuite john?
Maybe the Beast lives.
About the picture: “I would like to thank you for reminding me there is more to life than finances,” writes Cindy. “I got a dog after years of reading your blog. It was a great decision. Benny is a 1 year old Havapoo living his best life and enhancing mine.”
To be in touch or send a picture of your beast, email to ‘garth@garth.ca’.