While most consumers seem to appreciate the convenience of an increasingly digital economy, a CBDC is a radical change from using credit cards and online banking apps. A CBDC would likely lead to a cashless economy, in which all financial transactions can be monitored and controlled by government. A cashless economy would create severe hardship for people who are homeless, technologically illiterate, or without ready access to the internet.
For Canadians who look after their finances electronically, cash remains essential to protect their rights and freedoms, including their privacy, security, and autonomy. In a cashless economy, all transactions are digital, subject to surveillance, and ultimately subject to government control. CBDC opens the door for governments to reward or penalize Canadians for their personal choices on how to live, where to go, and what to do with their own money.
Governments can use CBDC to restrict when, where, and what people are allowed to buy, leading to a level of control resembling communist China’s notorious “social credit” system. China uses “social credit” to reward citizens who support the Communist Party and its rules and policies. Those who criticize the Party can find themselves unable to board a train, plane, or subway, denied a bank loan, or prevented from enrolling their children in the best schools and universities.
Cash means privacy and confidentiality.
If I use cash to pay for gas for my car, then no bank, credit card company, or government will know that I was (for example) at the Shell station on Southland Drive in Calgary at 8:45 a.m. on Monday, March 10, 2025. Nor will anyone know how much I spent on gas that morning (other than the gas station’s staff, who likely won’t know my name). If, three hours later, I use cash to pay for a meal at a restaurant in Edmonton, no corporation or government will know that I travelled from Calgary to Edmonton that morning. I don’t have to be doing anything sinister or illegal in Edmonton to care about my privacy. Why should I be subjected to surveillance simply because I exist?
If a CBDC is imposed and the economy goes cashless, government will know, at all times, about every purchase, sale, investment and donation made by every Canadian. A government, once armed with this knowledge, can exercise stringent and detailed control over many aspects of the life of a citizen.
Many Canadians don’t care about their privacy being violated when banks and credit card companies acquire vast amounts of information about the habits, movements, and preferences of consumers. However, governments are radically different from private corporations. By definition and by their very nature, governments exercise coercive power over citizens. Using coercive power is good when governments enforce Criminal Code prohibitions against murder, theft, and terrorism. However, governments can also use their coercive power to violate human rights, civil liberties, and constitutional freedoms, always on the basis of some nice-sounding pretext. Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, hence our constitution is intended to protect citizens from tyranny.
Some argue that we will never see communist Chinese “social credit” in Canada. But it already happened here in February 2022, when the federal government froze the bank accounts of hundreds of Canadians who had not broken any law or committed any crime. These Canadian citizens were punished by the state for having donated money to a peaceful protest movement that was hated by the prime minister of the day. They had no opportunity to challenge, dispute, or appeal the severe penalty which government imposed on them without warning.
Cash alone made it possible for these victimized Canadians to buy groceries, pay their heating bills in winter, and secure other necessities. If Canada’s economy had been cashless in February 2022, the government’s freezing of bank accounts would have inflicted far more harm.
When governments made the new COVID vaccine mandatory in 2021, imposing the penalty of second-class citizenship for non-compliance, governments used QR codes to turn personal, private medical records into quasi-public documents that needed to be shown to complete strangers working at restaurants, gyms, and movie theatres. With this track record of violating the privacy of citizens, why would governments hesitate to control what Canadians spend their money on?
A digital dollar provides politicians, bureaucrats, and bankers with intimate access to our inner lives. Therefore, a CBDC poses a grave threat to Charter rights and freedoms. It’s up to Canadians to make CBDC an issue in the coming election. Voters should urge their MPs and their provincial representatives to pass laws that protect cash and the right to use it.
