OTTAWA — As the sun set and Parliament Hill lit up across a bend in the Ottawa River, the jazz combo gamely played through a set of standards in the National Gallery of Canada’s glass-walled atrium.

Had any couples been dancing to “Autumn Leaves” or the band’s peppy rendition of “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore” on this Monday night in October, they would have been in no danger of bumping into each other at the Canadian Bitcoin Consortium’s party capping its annual lobbying push in the capital.

The lobbying had gone well, it would later turn out. The cocktail party, not so much.

In opposite corners of the atrium were displays set up by CoinFlip and Localcoin, two companies that operate crypto ATMs.

Their businesses were squarely in the Liberal government’s sights as tools for laundering money and enabling fraud, a view both companies were fighting. CoinFlip’s booth had a screen looping a cartoon video of a coin-shaped character going through all kinds of security checks on the way into a carnival before being allowed (alone) on a tame “Bitcoin Ride.” The coin looked sad.

At the party’s peak, about 50 guests circulated in a venue that can hold more than 500. They were exceptionally well dressed—many of the men in tuxedos, women in cocktail dresses or ball gowns. That was probably part of the problem.

“I won’t do the black-tie gala again,” Koleya Karringten, the Bitcoin advocacy group’s executive director, told The Logic later, from her home in Calgary.

Forcing attendees to go home and dress up after a day of work? Bad idea, especially on a Monday night when multiple other groups were also vying for parliamentarians’ and policymakers’ attention.

But that’s when the nice room—in a venue a bit far from Parliament Hill, Karringten realized too late—was available. “It’s fricking difficult to book anything in Ottawa,” she lamented.

Except, maybe, time on policymakers’ calendars.

“I have engagement from the finance minister’s office. I have engagement from the Conservatives. I get called into House of Commons committee hearings on things. We’ve even had engagement from members of the Senate to have meetings with us,” Karringten said.

She left Ottawa with the impression that the government was wavering in its belief that crypto ATMs are little other than crime machines—and she was right: A month later, the Liberals moved to restrict them but ditched the outright ban.

“I think they’re very firm on the sense that they are not going to allow for aspects of the industry that support financial crimes, and we 1,000 per cent support that opinion,” she said. “I think that we came with a lot of clarifying information that they may not have been previously aware of.”

Prime Minister Mark Carney is a former central banker and financier who has spent his life working with the fiat money that crypto’s fiercer advocates want to replace. The current Liberal government’s priorities are container terminals, copper mines and military goods, not replacing the dollar with blockchain money. That contrasts with President Donald Trump’s administration south of the border, which has made crypto-friendly policies a cornerstone.

But Ottawa is willing to engage with the crypto industry on a technical level, Karringten said. “We never had a door closed to us in terms of their willingness to meet, willingness to have a conversation, willingness to let us present materials to them.”

Under Justin Trudeau, the Canadian government ranged from uninterested to hostile to the cryptocurrency sector, Karringten said. “I’d say that Mark Carney’s government has been 1,000 times more open.”

That openness has translated to some concrete wins for the crypto industry. In addition to the walkback on crypto ATMs, Ottawa softened its proposed total ban of paying yield or rewards to holders of stablecoins, crypto tokens pegged to the value of a central bank-issued currency. Draft regulations released in October permit remunerations based on transactions, similar to how credit card rewards work.

Since Carney took office, the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions (OSFI) has likewise made some crypto-friendly moves. Last year, OSFI head Peter Routledge said he wouldn’t stand in the way of banks experimenting with stablecoins. In September, OSFI said it considers bank deposits issued on blockchains to be legally the same as traditional bank deposits. Shortly after, the Big Six banks announced they were are collaborating on a tokenized deposit payment network.

Eric Richmond, head of Canada for the American crypto-trading giant Coinbase, also said he hasn’t had trouble getting meetings with the federal Liberals, even as they advance an agenda focused on major physical projects. He said the government’s interests intersect with the crypto industry’s on innovation, competitiveness and AI leadership.

Ottawa is “trying to bring back that entrepreneurial spirit to Canada,” Richmond said. “It’s similar to what digital asset policy is. It’s economic policy.”

Carney’s pre-politics book, Value(s), devoted several pages to his thoughts on digital cash.

He was deeply suspicious of independent cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, which “raise a host of issues around consumer and investor protection, market integrity, money laundering, terrorism financing, tax evasion and the circumvention of capital controls and international sanctions,” he wrote. But he had evidently thought about the technology a lot.

Stablecoins made more sense to him. Eventually, central bank digital currencies—which are similar to stablecoins, but overseen by monetary authorities—will very likely replace traditional money, he judged. 

They could “serve all the functions to which private cryptocurrencies and stablecoins aspire while addressing the fundamental legal and governance issues that will, in time, undermine those alternatives.”

So maybe it’s little surprise that the government Carney leads is willing to talk about standards and regulations rather than treating crypto as toxic. Technical matters are where Karringten would prefer to focus, anyway—cryptocurrency as a financial technology, not an ideological movement aimed at bringing down the traditional financial system by ending money as we know it.

“The second digital assets becomes a wedge issue, then all of a sudden nothing moves forward unless you have a government that’s [in favour],” she said. When a new party comes to power, everything stops again.

Discussing how to get the benefits of a new financial tool while minimizing the risks of fraud and other evils is more appealing, Karringten said. “This isn’t something that needs to be controversial, right?”