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Was anybody actually using pennies, anyway?

According to Desjardins, the penny does have some friends: the mining industry, armoured trucks and manufacturers of coins rolls and boxes. “Are we ready to bear an additional cost of over $100-million per year on the pretext that we must artificially support these companies?,” reads the report.

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What will we do without them?

As per the 2010 senate recommendations, Canadians will simply be asked to round prices up or down to the nearest nickel. Credit card users, however, will still be required to pay to pay to the cent. Does that discrepancy leave Canada vulnerable to small-scale fraud, like the Richard Pryor character in Superman III who scams his employer by filling a dummy account with the fractions of cents left over from financial transactions? Maybe, but so far nobody else seems to have had a problem with ditching low-denomination coins. Like most currency-related issues, Canada is way behind the times on this one. More than a dozen countries including Israel, Switzerland and Brazil have successfully eliminated single-unit coins. Not to mention the iconic British half-penny, which was phased out under Margaret Thatcher.

How long have been carrying around these things?

Thursday’s budget announcement brings an end to 104 years of Canadian pennydom. On January 2, 1908, the governor general’s wife herself struck the country’s first one-cent coin at what would become the Royal Canadian Mint. Age has not been kind to the tiny coin: Today’s pennies are worth less than one quarter of the value of a penny in 1904. Although King Edward VII’s portrait was on the coins back then, maple leaves have remained fixed on the coin from the very beginning – except for 1967 when an Alex Colville image of a rock dove in flight was minted to celebrate Canada’s centennial.