My family and I were denied housing, car rentals and even hotel reservations, all because we didn’t have a credit card.
I’ve wanted to travel the world since I was a teenager. In 2009, after studying mechanical engineering at a university in Nigeria, I got a job with an oil and gas company that sent me to Texas. Three years later, I moved to India for work and, since then, I’ve lived in 15 countries. During all that globetrotting, I met and married my wife, Bola, and we had two children. For years, Bola and the kids were going back and forth between Nigeria and wherever I was located at the time.
Upon landing, my Uber app didn’t work because I didn’t have a Canadian credit card. We’d only brought debit cards: Nigeria, and all the countries I’ve lived in, operated on debit. We ended up paying cash for a cab to take us to our hotel. There, the front desk said they couldn’t honour our reservation without a credit card, so we paid a deposit equivalent to a three-night stay before they accepted us.
I didn’t understand the concept of credit at the time. Back home, debt is a bad thing: no one wants to owe anyone money. But in Canada, credit underpins much of daily life, allowing banks and landlords to assess your risk profile. This creates a gap in the immigration system: the only way a person can start a life here is with a credit history, which newcomers don’t have. I’ve met many immigrants who faced the same hurdle.
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