The Royal Canadian Mint will stop producing pennies this fall, announced Finance Minister Jim Flaherty during his budget speech on Thursday.
During a news conference, Flaherty referred to the penny as a “currency without any currrency” and the government was acting on “. . . what everyone agrees should have been done long ago.”
“Pennies take up too much space on our dressers at home,” said Flaherty during his budget speech.
“They take up far too much time for small businesses trying to grow and create jobs. It costs taxpayers a penny-and-a-half every time we make one. We will, therefore, stop making them.”
Debit and credit cards will still use penny increments for payment. Cash payments, however, will be rounded up or down to the nearest nickel.
The government says the cost of the producing the penny had risen to $11 million a year.
And what to do with all those pennies lying around? The government suggested giving them to charity.
Pennies are mostly made of zinc and plated with copper.
4 Comments
Claude B.
Ho! No more “Penny Stocks” ! 🙂
Would we should mention that xx stock went un $0.02 ??
Rl56
What a sad day for all of us Canadians. The penny is the most important currency in our dollar. Oh yes the government will really enjoy this, round up to the nearest nickel. So who gets to keep the other 4 pennies out of the nickel, humm guess who, NOT YOU!!!!!
So instead of having pennies on our dressers we will give out nickels, whatever way you look at it we loose again…..
TC88
Yes, the conservatives are masters in doing things that do not matter to anyone but big business. Just one more way to force people to use their debit cards that much more and we all know that just allows that much more tracking on spending habits and gathering market information for the big companies. They hate it when people pay cash because they cannot track anything. Pay cash whenever possible and don’t pay the man !!! A very sad day indeed !!!
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