All major exchanges have this, it’s required by law in many countries. The only way to get shitcoins more or less anonymously is by buying them in private. If you don’t know anyone then you can buy them from slightly shady people (relative to exchanges, who are completely shady, every single one) at sites like localmonero.

They’ll only ask for the swab once you try and get your money out.

In addition to what has already been said, there will be haveno.exchange somewhen in the future.

Most of the big exchanges require KYC know your customer information, but it depends on your jurisdiction. You can access some exchanges from a VPN to avoid this requirement, but you’ll need a way to fund your account, and often times you’ll need KYC to add a bank account and fees are high for paying with card. So you’ll need to figure out a fiat on ramp, or a way to convert your money CAD to cryptocurrencies that you can send and trade at any exchange. There are p2p localBitcoin exchanges online where you can buy directly from an individual and Bitcoin ATMs but these both have higher fees. Or you could get paid in cryptocurrency or buy something and sell it for cryptocurrency or maybe figure something out with prepaid gift cards. Or you could just use a KYC exchange and hope nothing comes of all the blockchain analytics data collection and tax reporting. If you used a KYC exchange and wanted to anonymize your coins, oi could withdraw to a wallet and use a mixer service. Or you could simply transfer your coins around to different wallets addresses and non KYC exchanges to obfuscate their origins. Or you could utilize a privacy coin like Monero to hide the transaction. Once you have some funds in the cryptocurrency ecosystem it’s much easier to interact with a decentralized exchange DEX or a cross chain atomic swap to trade without having to provide personal information.

Try localcryptos or bisq