Your Bank Just Abandoned Your Town. And They Called It Progress.
- Michael Routhier
- 7 hours ago
- 5 min read
There's a small town in Ontario called Brussels.
Population just over a thousand people. About a hundred kilometres north of London. Surrounded by farmland. The kind of town where you know your neighbours and the main street has been there for generations.
CIBC just closed its last branch there.
Done. Gone. The nearest bank is now 32 kilometres away in Listowel.
I want you to sit with that for a second. Because the people most affected by this aren't young professionals who do everything on their phone. The people most affected are seniors. Mennonite families. People without reliable transportation. People who never got comfortable with online banking because nobody ever sat down with them and helped them get comfortable with it.
And the bank's official response?
"Customer traffic was low and virtual transactions are increasing."
That's it. That's the whole explanation.
This Is Not a Brussels Problem
Brussels is not alone.
Marathon, Ontario, a town in the northwest, hours from anywhere, just lost its last Scotiabank branch. The closest alternative is roughly three and a half hours away in Thunder Bay. Three and a half hours.
Red Lake, Ontario fought to keep its branch. The mayor wrote directly to Scotiabank. He said, and I'm quoting him because his words deserve to be repeated; "This sends a concerning message to northwestern Ontario; that profitability takes precedence over people, and convenience is prioritized over community."
Scotiabank's response was polished, professional, and final.
The branch closed on schedule.
Schreiber lost its BMO branch. The communities keep shrinking on the map. And the banks keep posting record profits.
Let Me Tell You What This Actually Means
I talk to people in this community every week. Adults in their 60s, 70s, 80s. People who have banked in person their entire lives because that is how banking worked when they built their habits, raised their families, and ran their businesses.
Some of them don't have reliable internet. Some of them have internet but have never been shown how to use online banking safely, and frankly, given what I know about banking scams and phishing attacks targeting older adults, their caution is not irrational. It's actually pretty sensible.
Some of them have mobility issues. Some of them don't drive anymore. Some of them live alone.
And now the nearest bank is 32 kilometres away.
The bank calls it a shift toward virtual transactions. I call it transferring the burden of access entirely onto the people who can least afford to carry it, and then congratulating yourself for being efficient.
The Part That Makes Me Actually Angry
Here's what I want you to notice.
The banks aren't losing money. They're not in crisis. They're not closing branches because they have no choice. Canadian banks posted billions in profits last year. Billions. With a B.
They're closing branches because branches cost money to run and online transactions are cheaper to process. That's it. It is a pure cost optimization decision dressed up in language about "customer preferences" and "evolving how we provide services."
Customer preferences.
You know what the preference of a 78-year-old woman in Brussels, Ontario is? To be able to walk into a bank, hand a cheque to a human being she recognizes, and walk out knowing her money is where she put it. That's her preference. And she had it for fifty years without anyone suggesting it was a problem.
Now it's a problem because it costs the bank money to accommodate it.
And Here's the Connection Nobody Is Making
We spent the last two weeks talking about the IMF's warning that AI-powered cyberattacks on the global banking system are inevitable. That the entire financial infrastructure is fragile in ways most people don't know about.
The same banks that are telling rural Ontarians to go online; because it's safer, easier, more convenient, are running on shared digital infrastructure that, by the IMF's own assessment, will eventually be breached.
So the plan is; close the physical branches, push everyone online, and then tell them to figure it out when the system gets hit.
And in the meantime, for the 78-year-old woman in Brussels who never got comfortable online? She's just on her own. Drive 32 kilometres or figure out the app.
That's not a technology problem. That is a policy failure. A values failure. A fundamental failure of institutions that have been trusted with people's life savings for decades and have decided those people's inconvenience is an acceptable cost of doing business.
What Seneca Would Have Said
"It is not that I dare too little, but that I aim too low."
The banks aimed at efficiency. They hit it. They missed everything else.
They missed the 80-year-old farmer who cashes his cheques in person because he doesn't trust anything he can't hold in his hand. They missed the woman who drives her mother-in-law to the bank every Thursday because that's the one outing she looks forward to all week. They missed the small business owner who makes change from the branch on Main Street because ATMs don't give him the denominations he needs.
All of that was real. All of it mattered. None of it appeared in a cost-benefit analysis.
And so it was cut.
What You Can Actually Do
I'm not going to pretend this is fixable by you individually. It isn't. This requires political pressure, regulatory action, and frankly a much louder conversation than it's been getting.
But here's what I'd ask you to do.
If you live in a community that still has a bank branch; use it. Physically. In person. Regularly. I'm serious. Branch traffic is one of the only metrics that makes banks reconsider closure decisions. If the traffic data says the branch is used, it stays. If it doesn't, the spreadsheet makes the decision.
If your branch has already closed. Look into your local credit union. Credit unions are member-owned, are not beholden to shareholders in the same way, and have a track record of serving communities that the big banks walk away from. When TD left Mount Albert, a credit union stepped in. They don't always, but they're worth asking.
If you're helping an older adult navigate this transition. Please don't just hand them a phone and a tutorial video. Sit with them. Walk through it. Make sure they know what a legitimate banking app looks like, what a scam attempting to impersonate one looks like, and what to do when something feels wrong. The same people being pushed online are the primary targets of online banking fraud. Those two facts exist at the same time and nobody in a bank boardroom seems to find that interesting.
Before You Go
I want to know if this has hit your community.
Has a bank branch closed near you, or near someone you care about? What happened? Did something step in, or did people just absorb the loss quietly and get on with it the way Canadians tend to do?
Because I think this is one of those things that happens town by town, quietly, without enough noise. And the lack of noise is exactly how banks get away with it.
Drop it in the comments. And if you know someone in a rural community who needs to hear this, share it. The conversation needs more voices in it than it's getting.
— Michael Routhier, Founder of Tech 4 Grown-Ups. I run free digital safety seminars for adults 55+ and write about tech threats as they happen. Learn more about me →