Cards as political pawns?

Lafferty members will recall Russian payment scheme NPSK chief executive Vladimir Komlev at a Lafferty conference in 2019 speaking about Mir, the Russian card scheme created after Visa and Mastercard halted services in the country following the Crimean invasion of 2014. Now it looks like Canada might follow suit, presumably looking to Carte Bancaire for inspiration. Say what now? Canadians are boycotting American goods and services for a variety of reasons to do with tariffs and Donald Trump’s provocations that Canada should become the next US state. “‘It's fairly easy to replace your American-grown tomatoes with Mexican ones or your U.S.-made car with a Japanese car,’ notes Canadian finance writer JP Koning. ‘But networks, which tend towards monopolization, are not so easy to bypass. Which gets us into the meatier issue of national sovereignty. The difficulty we all face boycotting the MasterCard and Visa networks reveals how Canada has let itself become over-reliant on these critical pieces of U.S financial infrastructure.” Koning writes that the US could use Canada’s dependence on its card networks to extract concessions, “eventually making a play to slowly annex Canada—not by invasion, but by ‘Canshluss’. If so, this will involve using our dependencies on U.S. systems, including the card networks, to extract concessions from us.” Unlikely? Who knows these days.