A consumer group is urgently calling on the federal government to follow other jurisdictions in the U.S and Europe and bring in legislation to stem the slide toward a cashless society.
Only 10 per cent of transactions in Canada today are done using cash, according to Carlos Castiblanco, an economist with the group Option Consommateurs.
"There is a need to protect cash right now before more merchants start refusing [it]," Castiblanco recently told CBC Radio's Ontario Today.
It's critical to act now, he added, before retailers begin removing all of the infrastructure required to store and maintain physical money.
"They are already used to dealing with cash," he said. "So this is the moment to act, before it is more complicated."
In a report called "Will cash be a thing of the past?", Option Consommateurs published one of the first deep dives into who is still using coins and paper money.
A recent online poll of some 1,500 people commissioned by a different group, Payments Canada, found that a majority of respondents were worried about the prospect of cashless stores and want to maintain the option to use cash — which is free from bank fees, isn't susceptible to privacy breaches and can be used during internet outages.
"There's still very solid demand for cash," Sharon Kozicki, the deputy governor of the Bank of Canada, said in a recent interview with CBC.
The bank closely tracks how money gets used, she said, with the use of cash actually rising at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.
While that growth has slowed, Kozicki said there's still an "overall general increase that suggests people still want it."
That report, titled "Social policy implications for a less-cash society," recommends legislative action, arguing that cash-based transactions have plummeted from 54 per cent in 2009 to 10 per cent as of 2021.
One of its authors, Aftab Ahmed, described who would be most affected by a world with no cash in a recent article in Policy Options, the online magazine for the Institute for Research on Public Policy.
"For many — such as Indigenous peoples, unhoused individuals, older Canadians, victims of domestic abuse and others who are vulnerable — cash is a beacon of economic security, a source of financial autonomy, an emergency lifeline and an emblem of cultural traditions," Ahmed wrote.
"Canada must avoid sleepwalking into a cashless future and instead recognize the risk of exacerbating financial exclusion of those most vulnerable."
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