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.

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[–] merc@sh.itjust.works 10 points 1 day ago (3 children)

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.

[–] FreeBooteR69@lemmy.ca 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

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.

[–] phoenixz@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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

[–] merc@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 day ago

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.

[–] Nosavingthrow@lemmy.world -1 points 1 day ago

You lack imagination.