Following the lead of countries like Australia, Canada may consider ditching our lowest denomination coin; the penny.

MP Pat Martin is drafting a private member’s bill to kill this seemingly useless coin, and it seems to have a large number of people talking.  What I find interesting in the conversations at the neighbourhood coffee house, though, is that there is no clear direction as to whether people think this will be a good thing or not.

To get around the problem of what to do when your coffee comes out to $1.77, Martin proposes a rounding system akin to the method found in Australia.  Everything would be rounded up or down to the nearest nickle (5 cents) when paying with cash.  Debit and credit purchases would continue to work with full cents, and gas companies would continue to charge in tenths of cents.

This reminds me of the tactic that my family used when playing Monopoly.  The $1 was useless when you landed on property, so everything was rounded up to the nearest 5, and the $1 was dubbed the $1,000 bill.  It was a great system … since I was more often than not the one with the Monopoly at the end of the game.

But some people think this is some sort of twisted socialist plot.  One person at the coffee shop today seemed to think that gasoline companies would actually change their pricing to work in 5 cent increments (which would likely cause Canadians to take up arms at home for the first time since the Battle of Stoney Creek).  Others believe that by scrapping this coing and saving the $30million annual production costs, we could put that money towards some worthy causes such as education or health care.

I believe the greatest benefit of this draft bill is not what the bill proposes to do, but instead the discussions that are ensuing because of it.  There are some pretty surley people that sit at some of my favourite coffee shops and they have very unique perspectives on the situation.  My favourite, of course, being the suggestion that rather than ditch the penny, we should introduce a new one that is worth 1/10th of a cent.  This way when we go to buy gas, we’re not losing out to the rounding that happens at the pump.

I highly doubt this bill will pass even first reading at the Parliament, but the discussions should be lively.  I believe that if the penny is truly going to be eliminated from the market, then the market needs to first kill it silently themselves.  Many places offer club cards that offer instant discounts on products.  If the cash machines were configured to ensure the final sale was a nice round figure that eliminated the need for pennies, then they wouldn’t need so many.  Banks wouldn’t have to order the same quantity, as stores would undoubtedly rarely require more than a few rolls a week.  And consumers would have fewer pennies to squirrel away in buckets or jars in the house.

What’s your take on the situation?  Would the elimination of the penny benefit Canadians?  If nothing else, it would speed up the supermarket lines as people no longer fish out eight pennies from their pockets.