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Your Visa Card Is an American Weapon., and More Than 400 US Doctors and Nurses Have Moved to B.C.
News for residents of the “11th province”: Canadians abroad.
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Your Visa Card Is an American Weapon. Canada Has No Backup.
Visa and Mastercard control 96% of Canada's credit card market. Both are American companies. And as a new piece in The Walrus argues, that makes every Canadian swipe a potential pressure point.
The case of Kimberly Prost may be illustrative. Prost is a Canadian judge at the International Criminal Court who was investigating alleged American war crimes. The Trump administration sanctioned her in August 2025, so now she now has to phone hotels in advance to explain why she can't pay with a credit card because the payment networks quietly cut her off.
Russia got the full version of this treatment in 2022, when both Visa and Mastercard pulled out overnight after the Ukraine invasion. And Canada's own Rogers outage in 2022 - which knocked out Interac for 12 million subscribers and cost an estimated $142 million - showed how fragile the plumbing is.
Canada does have Interac for debit, but there's no domestic alternative for credit cards or online payments. The Walrus piece makes the pitch that Ottawa should be building one through the Digital Governance Council. For Canadians living abroad, the vulnerability is clear as your financial life runs entirely through networks controlled by a foreign government that has shown it's willing to weaponize them.
Read more: The Walrus / The Globe and Mail
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More Than 400 American Doctors and Nurses Have Moved to B.C.
British Columbia started recruiting US healthcare workers in March 2025. Now, a year on, more than 400 have accepted job offers and moved north - 89 doctors, 260 nurses, 42 nurse practitioners, and 23 allied health professionals.
More than 2,750 American healthcare workers applied. Nursing applications rose 127% between April 2025 and January 2026. One of the ways the province was able to pull it off was by shredding the red tape. US-trained doctors with American Board certification can get full BC licensure without extra exams, assessments, or training. Nurses skip the third-party credential review entirely. Processing that, once upon a time, took four months now takes days.
The pipeline runs through CUSMA, which allow those who work in a few dozen healthcare-related roles to get work permits, with permanent residency later a possibility through Express Entry or BC's Provincial Nominee Program.
It's a small but helpful reversal of the brain drain that’s sent Canadian healthcare pros south for decades. For Canadian doctors or nurses living abroad who've been thinking about coming home, BC just showed that the licensing wall everyone dreaded might not be there anymore.
Read more: CIC News