Eight months ago, the Canadian dollar
disappeared. Every cent in Canada was spent by people trying to win a
lottery that never ended up having an outcome, making every ticket
sold a loser and freezing the funds in an account that cannot be
legally accessed by anyone. The lottery was run as a pool to pick the
minute the Preacher Firestone would collapse and probably die, and
the winners would split the prize pool without the Interprovincial
Lottery Corporation taking a cut because the ILC figured the prize
pool would be tiny, since Firestone's endurance would give out after
a few days. As the weeks went on, more and more Canadians began
pouring money into tickets, figuring that science said Firestone had
to drop soon. The potential prize money was put into an account until
a winner was decided, but that never happened, and Firestone still
hasn't stopped his sermon. Everyone lost, with the exception of HSBC.
With the money never to be claimed, the HSBC International Bank made out like a bandit who held up an entire country, and they were now
free to invest all the money Canada had on the world's markets
without having to worry about anyone coming to call for it. What the
beginning of the crisis showed, aside from a harsh lesson in the
gambler's fallacy, was that the Canadian Government wasn't willing to
betray the trust put in the banking system by using the extraordinary
circumstances to breach the account the winnings were stored in. Of
course, by proving that they cared dearly for the stability of the
banking system, the Canadian Government ended up tanking the economy
that supported it, and ultimately ended up driving every bank in
Canada out of the country.
While HSBC executives frolicked in the
pile of money Canada willingly gave them, average citizens were faced
with a very serious situation they had to quickly adapt to. Luckily
one of the basic needs of human survival was already taken care of
for many Canadians, as immediately before the currency crisis
Canada's housing industry had been going the kind of manic that precedes a meltdown, so pretty much everyone who wanted a house had somewhere to live. With shelter taken care of, getting three squares
became Canadians biggest priority in the new economy, particularly in
regards to having enough food for a family to last the winter.
“People had to learn what seasons are again,” local
Recent-History expert Ovaltine Goose-Shredder says, “Suddenly
people were losing their shit because it's November and you can't get
peaches anymore, but that's what happens when your groceries are
dependant on our local climate. It was amazing to realize how much
local farming knowledge, how much natural, ancestral knowledge, had
been spoiled by the fact that we were getting avocados shipped in for
year round availability.” Despite Canadians being forced to scale
back their groceries to the limits of their climate, people took to
preserving with some vigour. With community leaders giving seminars
on what keeps and what doesn't, experts are hopeful that a full
famine will be avoided over the winter months.
In their death throes before the full
on collapse, banks were screaming to find a way to collect mortgage
payments. With a family in every house but without a currency, there
was no way to quantify what a family could pay for their roof, and
for six months after the currency crisis the banks tried every idea
their executive boards could come up with. The first was to lobby the
Canadian Government to replace the collapsed currency with anything
official that could denote value, but the government rejected this
idea, recognizing that since short term prospects were so horribly
mangled that citizens were only focused on where their next meal was
coming from, government economists could get away with taking the
time for a measured response that would benefit the country in the
long run. This was terrible news for the banks, who immediately went
to the courts and tried to shoehorn some specious legal precedents
into forcing the government to act, and when that failed, they tried
to legally force delinquent debtors into indentured servitude, which
also failed. At this point the banks would have sent collectors and
assessors to jam their feet into people's doors like Jehova's, but
over the months of legal battles they had been hemorrhaging employees
because banks without currency produce absolutely nothing, and
nothing don't pay the bills. When they finally accepted that everyone
either gets by or they don't in the new economy, and there's no
quantifying income beyond that, the banks did the last thing they
could and tried to kick everyone in Canada out of their homes for
non-payment of their mortgage. It turns out, trying to toss every
homeowner out on the street is exactly what it takes to get under a
country's bonnet, and there were protests. Big ones. Like too big for
any earthbound institution to handle kind of big, and the government
caved to the pressure from the citizens and told the banks to go fuck
themselves, but before they could fuck themselves the banking system
dissolved.
With many Canadians having difficulty
raising themselves beyond a subsistence living, the thought of
building a new house is completely out of the question for most
citizens. A giddy supporter of Canada's new economic arrangement,
Ovaltine Goose-Shredder is one of the few people living in a new
house instead of squatting in an older one. Just trying to see if it
could be done through barter, Goose-Shredder was able to get a house
built because he is considered to be a wealthier citizen in the new
economy. “My 8 part novel has really taken off,” Goose-Shredder
explained, “It's a sexy supernatural thriller in the vein of Harry
Potter and Twilight, and I combined the two with the Shopaholic
series for a great twist. It's about a magic werewolf that really
likes purses, and I've been trading copies for clothing, candles and
foodstuffs. This freed me up to trade the bigger stuff I produce for
things like bricks and lumber.” While he loves that he was able to
complete the project, Goose-Shredder admitted that he had to scale
back the size of his house to fit the new economy. “It's a 700 square foot house, which is a lot smaller than my last one, but there
were a lot of challenges in getting this one built, and that's a lot
more interesting to me than having enough space to never have to see my family.”
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