Letter: While Bank Profits Go National, Rural Towns Like Mildmay Foot the Bill
When big banks call rural branches "inefficient," what they mean is your loyalty no longer matters. A response from Bruce County.
LETTER TO THE EDITOR
To the Editor,
The Bank of Montreal has announced it is abandoning branch service in Mildmay. No counter service. No ATM. No human beings. Just a locked door, a press release, and a suggestion that we all “go online.”
The reasons are almost poetic in their arrogance.
It’s “not cost-efficient.” There isn’t enough “traffic.” Renovations are “prohibitive.” Staff don’t like using the downstairs washroom. And anyway, customers can still access their accounts digitally — assuming, of course, they live in the bank’s preferred universe.
This would be funny if it weren’t so revealing.
Mildmay has a large Mennonite community — families who have banked locally for generations, who do not use the internet, and who still travel by horse and buggy. Their new banking solution is a 27-kilometre trip to a centralized branch in Hanover. That’s not a “customer journey,” it’s a winter endurance test. Try pitching that to an old mare in February and calling it innovation.
Let’s stop pretending this is about bathrooms or foot traffic. It’s about a highly profitable bank deciding that a real community no longer earns its keep on a spreadsheet.
For decades, Mildmay deposited its wages, financed its farms, paid its mortgages, and kept this institution liquid enough to grow into a financial giant. Now the favour is returned with a locked door and a Wi-Fi password.
This is how corporate logic works: profits are national, responsibility is optional, and inconvenience is rural.
So here’s the real question — one banks used to answer without flinching: does a bank exist to serve a community, or does a community exist to serve a bank?
Because when a billion-dollar institution tells a farming town it’s “inefficient,” what it’s really saying is this: we took your money, we took your loyalty, we took your history — and now we’re done with you. That’s not banking. That’s extraction.
Printed in Bruce County — where communities still exist, even when corporations decide they’re inefficient.
David Wood
Mildmay
Letters to the Editor do not necessarily reflect the opinions or beliefs of The Owen Sound Current and its editor or publisher.
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I'm so sorry to hear this. It's atrocious that the bank would pull out without even an ATM. If you can, I'd suggest writing to the BMO's head office at 1 First Canadian Place, Toronto, Ontario, M5X 1A1, and asking that your letter be shared with the corporate Board of Directors.
I feel David’s frustration and this certainly gives me pause to worry. If Mildmay is closing, how long will Tara remain open? CIBC closed in Chesley a couple years ago. What shocks me is the decision to not even keep an ATM. When we were at the ROMA conference a few weeks ago I heard this brought up by a few different communities. Closing a bank cuts off financial access for people. Especially with business banking, relationships are so important and if you don’t have people it’s hard to form a relationship.