CELPIP Reading Part 4 Practice Test: Cashless Retailers And The Right To Pay Cash

A discreet sign beside the till at Leah Dubois’s Ottawa café reads: “We’re card-only. Thanks for understanding.” Two years ago Dubois stopped accepting bills and coins at both of her locations, and she harbours no regrets. The hours she once surrendered each week to counting the float and queuing at the bank now go elsewhere; break-ins, an occasional worry, rarely cross her mind, and her employees can concentrate on customers. Cafés, food trucks and even some chain stores have followed suit.

Walter Fenwick, who volunteers with a seniors’ advocacy group, finds the trend troubling. Many older people, he observes, rely on cash to monitor their spending and to shield themselves from fraud, as do residents without bank accounts. He still recalls the nationwide network outage of 2022, when card terminals fell silent for most of a day: neighbours with bills in their wallets walked out with groceries, while everyone else abandoned their carts.

City councillor Teresa Morin has proposed a bylaw obliging most local businesses to accept cash, citing similar rules in Philadelphia and New York. “Cash is legal tender,” she argues. “A store shouldn’t be allowed to turn it away.”

Kyle Brandt, a spokesperson for an association of independent retailers, regards a mandate as an unwarranted burden on small enterprises, given the expense of security, insurance and staff time. “A family-run shop chooses its own hours. Why not how it gets paid? Unhappy customers can shop elsewhere.” He also disputes Morin’s legal reasoning: in Canada, legal tender applies chiefly to settling debts, not to purchases at a counter.

Samuel Osei, a payment-systems researcher in Toronto, observes that cash now accounts for a small fraction of Canadian purchases, yet a few percent of adults depend on it almost exclusively. He advocates a compromise: require cash wherever people buy essentials such as groceries, medication and public transit, and let boutiques and coffee shops decide for themselves. “Otherwise banks will dismantle ATMs as demand dwindles,” he cautions, “and still more merchants will refuse cash. That spiral’s hard to reverse.”

Morin, who has lately been meeting retailers, calls her draft “a starting point” ahead of this fall’s council debate.

Mr. Brandt’s advice to unhappy customers sounds reasonable until you live where I do. When our only grocery store went card-only, his suggestion that people simply 6. Choose…pay with their phones insteadcarry a little cashtake their custom down the roadask the owner for an exception became meaningless. My eighty-year-old father, one of the older people Mr. Fenwick has in mind, 7. Choose…budgets in bills and coinsvolunteers with an advocacy groupprefers the tills at chain storeshas given up on bank trips, and the change hit him hard.

Ms. Dubois may see cash as a chore, but Mr. Fenwick’s account of 2022 convinced me it is 8. Choose…a relic of the pastan invitation to thievesa needless expensecheap insurance.

As for Councillor Morin’s bylaw, I find it 9. Choose…too timidheavy-handedtoo narrowa gift to retailers; Dr. Osei draws the line more sensibly, at 10. Choose…businesses above a certain sizeneighbourhoods losing their ATMsindependent, family-run shopswhat nobody can go without. A rule that most owners can live with is likelier to survive council.