To clarify slightly: Starting in 2015, if your card has a chip, the bank/credit card company will blanket reject all transactions authenticated by swipe. If you have a card from a Canadian institution, it will be replaced by one with both a chip and magnetic strip by that time (and it probably was years ago already).

If your card only has swipe (like US tourists), presumably their institutions will still accept a swipe as valid authentication.

What if you use a Canadian card in the US?

They detect that and use swipe-authorization in those cases. But you can, and probably should, use the chip in Europe/Asia/Latin America where chip readers are widespread.

The banks have been distributing FAQs with all of these answers for years, btw.

> But you can, and probably should, use the chip in Europe/Asia/Latin America where chip readers are widespread.

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.

It will be backwards compatible. :-)