Credit Card Debt Collection

Debt today functions as a kind of makeshift insurance scheme for people without recourse to adequate wages or social assistance, pushing household borrowing to record highs—Canadian households now have the worst debt ratio of any G7 country, outpacing the US.

To carry a debt is to be ‘owned’ by someone—or by multiple someones. Your creditor has the right to collect, or otherwise make your life difficult; you have an obligation to make repayments. In servicing the loan, you have to earn an income somehow. Now you have two owners: your creditor, and your employer.

For me, this is exactly what’s so pernicious about the morality of debt: the way that financial imperatives constantly try to reduce us all, despite ourselves, to the equivalent of pillagers, eyeing the world simply for what can be turned into money—and then tell us that it’s only those who are willing to see the world as pillagers who deserve acce