🇨🇦 Canada talks digital sovereignty, then sells 1 in 3 transactions to San Francisco

Moneris processes roughly one-third of all payment transactions in Canada, and RBC plus BMO just handed it to Francisco Partners for $2 billion. So after years of sermons about privacy, resilience, and sovereign digital infrastructure, our banking aristocracy cashes out and ships the rails of Canadian commerce south. RBC pockets about $475 million after tax, BMO about $600 million, and Canadians get lectures from Ottawa about control over personal data. As reported, this means a U.S. private equity firm could control access to data from 325,000 points of commerce and more than five billion transactions a year.

This is the Trudeau-Carney era in one transaction: surrender first, issue a policy paper later. Evan Solomon babbles about a sovereign digital economy free from coercion while Canada’s own banks auction off a core payments network during a trade war with Washington. Globalized finance loves open borders, open markets, and open databases, just never open accountability. Canadians are learning the hard way that sovereignty dies less with a bang than with a board-approved sale.

🍁 Maple Chronicles