“The real issue was that people weren’t using them, they were putting them in jars at home, and we were doing the same thing at my house,” Flaherty said. He spoke today at the Royal Canadian Mint in Winnipeg, Manitoba, before pushing a button that stamped the last one-cent coin. 

 

The longest-serving finance minister in the Group of Seven nations promised in his March 29 budget to save C$11 million annually by eliminating the coin that he says costs 1.6 cents to mint. The price of copper, which is used in the penny’s production, has surged more than 330 percent since 2000.

Getting rid of the coin will have little impact on inflation, the Bank of Canada said in a May 2010 report. Electronic transactions will still be priced in cents, while retailers will round cash transactions to the nearest five-cent interval, according to the budget documents. The coin will still be usable in payments.