This is an issue I have experience and strong opinions about, and please take the following as one sample of the sentiment that is brewing in this country over policies that impact cashlessness, privacy, autonomy, freedom of movement and association, and lately, of speech. I just happen to be close to these issues from a tech and policy perspective, and am an expert at articulating these things, but regretably, this will be a bit political.

Framing the issue in terms of the "most vulnerable," ignores the effects of economic centralization on the majority. The current government is tremendously unpopular in a large segment of the population, and just this year it used our partial cashlessness to make the banks freeze the accounts of citizens who donated to an opposition activist cause that had constitutionally legitimate concerns. So much so that the government only avoided collapse from a loss of confidence by withdrawing its emergency powers legislation before it was about to be put down by our senate. It's polarized and getting bad fast.

Policies like cashlessness just consolidate economic division and the inevitable effect is a permanent underclass that starts in the grey markets using alternative means of exchange, and spreads to creating poverty traps and a parallel and inescapable underground economy that is more violent and exploitative as a result of its official isolation than anything we have today.
Just look at any country with official exchange rates for their debased or controlled currencies, and consider what their economic upsides are.

Cashlessness is a policy of economic polarization, not inclusion. It has become hard to believe that creating an underclass isn't the explicit agenda of the policy influencers behind it, because the middle class prosperity that characterizes Canadian society means that the status conferred on technocrats is too little to mollify their status anxiety. I know these people. I have worked with them in government, media, and tech for decades. I grew up with them and know their alumni. I have sat at their brunch tables. The thing they seethe most over is independent business owners whose way of life comes from providing value and the actual approval of the people who buy their products, and patronize their businesses. It is the inconsolable envy toward those whose contributions are actually desired by the people they live with - and not imposed in some social engineering scheme for fabricated constituencies of "the most vulnerable" that always seem to put the same people at the centre managing them. What this class hates is the basic natural dignity of people that comes from humble, competent achievement, and not the affectations of prestige. As though their impostor syndrome were our fault, because nobody recognizes them as elite outside their own circles. We owe them no deference, and this is unforgivable.

I would say what has changed in Canada over the last decade is that I see that people really openly hate each other, but that's not the whole picture. It's that the people actuated by their own hatred have graduated into our institutions and do not see themselves as accountable to the values of the society they grew up identifying as a victim of. We didn't care about what the Laurentian Consensus and the media class thought because we believed with distance, diversity, and different communities, we could co-exist peacefully. What is clear now is that this was naive.

The argument about locking activists bank accounts was, "but they were extremists," but when you compare them to the actual arsonists, looters, rioters, shooters, and knife criminals motivated by more fashionably acceptable causes like creating religious and racial conflict, it's like our government and chattering classes just humiliate themselves by parroting absurdities and lies, and then take out their shame on Canadians with even more self righteousness. It's a cycle of abuse that is winding up with ever more momentum. When you see the government ministers speaking television, it's something darker than smug. There's a relish for the impunity these actors have that people recognize as fundamentally anti-Canadian.

Advocates of cashlessness problematize the freedom of others instead of producing things anyone wants, because it's just easier. My prediction is we have less than 5 years before this country descends into a constitutional crisis more serious than the referendum on Quebec's separation in the early 90s. This isn't about the tech. I feel like we have a narrowing opportunity to stop antagonizing citizens with policies and utterly disconnected articles like these.