Canada is on the cutting edge of payment systems, for all that we have crummy shipping infrastructure.
Square in Canada is good thing, and I'd say potentially far more disruptive than they were even in the US. Having been in a seat where I had to negotiate and deal with almost every payment provider in Canada, and all of them verging on being downright evil IMO, a service that focuses on the customer experience (both merchant and end consumer) will be a fun disruption to watch.
If your card only has swipe (like US tourists), presumably their institutions will still accept a swipe as valid authentication.
The banks have been distributing FAQs with all of these answers for years, btw.
It's still pretty common to have 2-mode readers there (wehere you can chip or swipe), though they're slowly becoming rarer and I can't remember anybody actually using swipe.
The problem here is that Square is launching with, for the Canadian market, antiquated, rapidly approaching EOL technology, and given no indications if or when they'll catch up to the standard -- or even that they realize that their offering is substandard here compared to the US. Will they issue a new reader next month? A week before the deadline? Will they just pull out in 24 months?
No answers forthcoming.
(and that's on top of the other issues, like the vast majority of customers demand debit, and chip card credit cards that get swiped for transactions get declined at very high rates because it's highly correlated with skim fraud)
Between that and the total lack of Interac support, this is honestly a pretty lame offering. It feels like Square has absolutely no awareness of the current state of Canadian payment systems.