A penny for his thoughts? Not even close. Someone should wish NDP MP Pat Martin $30 million for his thoughts -- in particular his thought that it is past time the penny was abolished in Canada.
The $30 million is the amount the Canadian Mint would save annually by abolishing the penny, says a study by the Library of Parliament, which Mr. Martin is using to bolster his argument that the penny should no longer nickel and dime Canadians.
The production of the penny, which is no longer made of copper but steel, is not the problem. The mint mints them for 0.7 cents each, which means a penny is still actually worth something, but not much. The problem with pennies is that Canadians lose them, throw them away or store them in buckets by the millions. Last year the mint stamped out 815 million pennies. At 2.35 grams each, they are in weight as they are in value -- pretty much nothing. But together, they weigh almost two million kilograms. Moving all the coins from the mint to banks costs about $33 million. And for what? So that Canadians can toss them into give-a-penny-take-a-penny trays at cash registers or, more likely, into a penny jar on the kitchen counter.
Mr. Martin, who is drafting a private member's bill to abolish the penny as Australia, France, Spain and New Zealand have done, believes we should stop pouring pennies down the drain and instead free up the mint to pursue lucrative deals to produce coins for other nations.
Abolishing the penny would require a system of rounding prices up and down to the nearest nickel or dime. But that does not mean that all prices would need to be rounded, only the final tally. Stores could continue to offer 99 cents specials to make the price appear to be less than a buck. A grocery bill of, say $114.22, might contain dozens of items denominated in pennies, but if only the final tally is rounded, the price would drop two cents' worth to $114.20. Whether the price is rounded up or down by pennies, it would be a small price to pay for either consumers or merchants.
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