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.
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
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.