Digital identity, automated welfare, and the monetary layer taking shape beneath it.
Canada is entering a phase of administrative restructuring with consequences that reach beyond its official framing of “modernization.” A federal digital identity system is gradually replacing older access mechanisms, beginning with welfare recipients and pensioners—the groups least able to refuse. The change is quiet, technical, and incremental, but its implications are systemic.
Behind this transition lies a broader logic: tighter fiscal pressure driven by rising public-debt servicing; global AML/CFT requirements that increasingly bind governments and financial institutions to one another; and early planning for potential central-bank digital currencies (CBDCs). Together, these factors are weaving an architecture that resembles what scholars have begun to call a platform state—a governance model built around unified identity credentials, interoperable