A lot of small businesses don't take cash. It's actually more effort than it's worth. It's so easy these days to get a credit card payment setup, and you don't have to worry about people trying to rob you for the contents of the register anymore.

And in most rural areas of Canada, mail order is basically how you get most stuff anyway. The local economies are gone. It's too late. None of that is going to come back in a few months.

What they're doing here, specifically targeting things like payments at restaurants, is about the best bet possible at helping local economies. But two months is far too little to make a meaningful difference. Any benefit will be lost to the administrative costs of tracking all the paperwork.