No, I'm not talking about you, Bev; I'm talking about the lowly penny.
I personally am relieved that the jig is up for the lowly penny. It's been an aspiration of mine for a long time. But I'm not here to praise the government or the minister quite so much; I want to qualify my remarks, if I may.
By way of introduction, I do acknowledge—in the same vein that a broken clock is correct twice a day, I suppose—that the government is doing the right thing in this regard. The penny has no commercial value. It costs more to produce than it's worth, and it doesn't circulate in the way currency is supposed to circulate. We all know it winds up under your bed in a cookie jar or an ice cream pail more often than not.
In fact the penny has been an expensive nuisance for as long as most of us can remember. People don't even pick them up off the street any more. If you give a handful of pennies to a homeless guy, you get the stink eye instead of a thank you.
Mr. Chairman, I was shocked to learn that there are 30 billion pennies in circulation currently; that's billion with a b. Every year, the Royal Canadian Mint has been minting one billion more. It's an absurd situation, given that they cost more to produce than they're actually worth. Last year—I suppose getting into the spirit of restraint—they only produced 500 million new pennies.
To begin with, I want to address people's potential fears about rounding. In other jurisdictions where they have reduced the lowest denomination, be it a penny or a centavo or a peso, they've introduced a rounding formula. The empirical evidence has been that it's revenue neutral. People need not be concerned that merchants will round up all the time, to the disadvantage of the consumer.
People should also realize that the rounding only takes place on the final total purchase. If you're buying 50 items or 20 items in the grocery store, you're not rounding each individual item; you're only rounding the total figure.
I think that's important for committee members to realize as they're recommending yea or nay on this clause. The general public doesn't have to be afraid of rounding. In those jurisdictions, it's determined to be revenue neutral.
What I want to criticize, and I think the committee members should be aware of this as a reservation, is that the minister only went half way. This clause, as I understand it, only causes the Royal Canadian Mint to cease production of pennies; it doesn't take pennies out of the currency of the realm. I guess I would ask for confirmation from the witnesses that this is in fact the case.
In other jurisdictions, when they've eliminated the lowest denomination they would give, say, a two-year grace period, to give people time to gather them up and cash them in. But after a certain period of time that coin is no longer accepted as currency.
Am I correct in that interpretation?