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 the infrastructure required to store and maintain physical money.
Yeah, with an okay card the cash backs are just too good to pass up on… literally a couple thousand a year we’d be spitting on between my wife and I just making the purchases we’d have done anyway. I wouldn’t give a crap about going back to cash if it wasn’t for that.