So what if the Bank of Nova Scotia and the Royal Bank of Canada will no longer provide services to cannabis businesses?
I wouldn’t take it personally. It’s probably the fault of the licensed producers. Besides, even Colorado’s $1.2 billion cannabis industry is working with twenty, fifty and one-hundred dollar bills.
The Scotiabank-RBC write-off is a major pain in the neck, and an unnecessary one at that, but it’s also a good thing in the long-run.
Double-entry accounting has done wonders for civilization. Going digital has accelerated the process.
If going cashless is the way of the future, to combat drug crimes and terrorism, of course, and prohibition continues for BC Bud — then why don’t farms and dispensaries rely on non-state currencies like Bitcoin?
If everyone who smoked weed was also trading bitcoins through their smartphones, the transition to other non-cannabis goods and services would already have precedent and a working model thanks to BC Bud.
One of the major hurdles stopping the peer-to-peer money from doing to banking what Napster did to the music industry is the supply chain.
If industries started pricing their factors of production in something other than dollars, the end would be near.
As central banks worldwide inflate fiat currencies to oblivion, better models are already on the market. BC Bud can contribute uniquely and powerfully.
Commonality with Colorado, California’s underground market (also threatened by statist legalization), will strength the core of cannabis connoisseurs finding alternative, and superior transaction systems.
For, if even Colorado has a problem with the banks, then what hope is there for BC craft cannabis?
And if the Liberals are screwing up production and distribution, what makes you think they won’t write archaic cannabis banking rules?
Again, this is probably the fault of the LPs.
Set up in an artificial manner, and posed to overtake a middle class of craft producers, these crony-capitalists have lobbied for a police crackdown of the dispensary market.
Police, who evidently prioritize cannabis merchants over fentanyl deaths, maintain prohibition in spite of clear intentions to legalize in the spring.
Of course, legalization is not forthcoming. The government has every intention to place limits on the cannabis free market. And, without a free and fair market, there is no legalization.
The LPs have created their own uncertainty and, since banks are supposed to be risk-averse…
In addition to dealing with a competing craft market and the Harper-era rules binding them to indoor prison-production facilities, there is global legalization that will make outdoor exports the norm in Canada.
BC Bud will survive because of its genetics.
The LPs will end up on the ash-heap of history.
Scotiabank and RBC were right to keep their hands off the cannabis industry. BC Bud will continue to break the law until a free and fair market is accepted and the LPs ain’t worth the trouble.
But I wouldn’t worry too much. The Scotiabank-RBC write-off is also a great opportunity to use locally-owned credit unions, provided they’ll have you.
In the meantime, as civil disobedience with cannabis has garnered success, why not start applying some of that activism to the monopoly that prints money out of thin air and charges interest on it?