Today is the official retirement day for the Canadian penny. The little one-cent piece has become too expensive to mint: 1.6 cents per unit!
This just learned: Originally, "penny" referred to a two-cent coin. When the two-cent coin was discontinued, penny took over as the new one-cent coin's name. Penny was likely readily adopted because the previous coinage in Canada (up to 1858) was the British monetary system, where Canada used British pounds, shillings, and pence as coinage alongside U.S. decimal coins and Spanish milled dollars.
Production of the penny ceased in May 2012, and the Royal Canadian Mint ceased distributing them as of February 4, 2013.
Now that the penny is leaving Canada, math is suddenly a necessity (tell your kids): for cash transactions, an item that was C$1.01 or C$1.02 will be rounded down to C$1.00; C$1.03 or C$1.04 becomes C$1.05.
Oh! I nearly forgot: English AND Canadian French are Canada's official languages. So...au revoir, cent!
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