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Other nations that have either ceased to produce or have removed low denomination coins include Australia, Brazil, Finland, Israel, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and Britain.

“There are 30 billion pennies in circulation and every year they are minting more. It was just one of those no-brainer slam dunks. It’s a place where we can save money,” said the NDP’s Pat Martin, who has long campaigned for the penny to be abolished.

“Of the 30 billion pennies, I think half of them are under my bed in a big jar,” he said.

The Royal Canadian Mint will stop distributing penny coins to financial institutions later this year. As the coin slowly disappears, prices for cash transactions will be rounded up or down to the closest five cents.

Non-cash payments such as checks, credit and debit cards will continue to be settled to the cent.

No more pennies? Why?

They are worth almost nothing, they are cumbersome and they cost the government at least $130-million per year to keep in circulation. Most vending machines do not accept them and bartenders sneer at the sight of them – yet the Mint is still busy pumping out 25 pennies per Canadian per year – at a cost of 1.5 cents apiece. “If a coin has such low purchasing power that consumers refuse it, throw it away or horde it without worrying about putting it back into the distribution system, it would seem logical to stop producing it,” reads a 2007 report by Desjardins urging the penny’s demise. The senate joined in with an anti-penny report in 2010. “It is a piece of currency, quite frankly, that lacks currency,” said Senator Irving Gerstein at the time (the joke is popular; during Thursday’s budget announcement Mr. Flaherty said “the penny is a currency without any currency.”)