Yes. In Winnipeg in 2006, we produced a record number of coins, at 2.2 billion coins. When we started the year, we thought we would be producing about 1.4 billion. As the year wore on, the demand for Canadian circulation coinage kept increasing, to the point where we had to operate that Winnipeg plant flat out and even had to delay some of our foreign contracts so that we'd have the capacity to service the Canadian market.
Everyone is scratching their heads, wondering exactly why that is, as we move to more electronic payments and credit cards. You can pay for your parking and so on with credit cards now. So why did we experience this sudden demand increase for Canadian circulation coinage?
I think the best explanation is that if you look at the life of a coin, we make it, we put it in our inventories, and the banks demand it because retailers demand it. Retailers demand the coins to give change to customers, you people at this table.
What do you do with your coins? I don't know about you, but I have a big jar at home, and I put them there. Many Canadians are putting their coins in jars and not putting them back into circulation, because they don't use their coins any more to pay for parking meters or transit fares or you name it. So we have a large inventory of coins building up, but the retailers are still demanding, particularly in this hot economy, coins for commercial purposes. So we've seen that big run-up in demand for circulation coinage.