Most data suggests physical currency won't be disappearing anytime soon
CALGARY — Whether they're rattling around in your car's cup holder or have vanished permanently into the couch cushions, coins are easy to take for granted.
But Marie Lemay, president of the Royal Canadian Mint, acknowledged in an interview that there are also long-term pressures on the corporation and its product. Since February 2013, when the Mint stopped producing pennies due to rising costs relative to face value, overall demand for other Canadian circulation coins has been declining by about eight per cent per year, she said.
But she said the Mint, which still employs about 350 people at its Winnipeg production centre, has been planning for this transition. She said the corporation's goal isn't production for the sake of production, but ensuring there are always enough coins to meet demand. "In 2020, we saw demand drop by 37 per cent," Lemay said. "Now it's starting to come back up. But the question we still don't have the answer to, is how far up it will go."
Low-income Canadians as well as those living in rural and Indigenous communities are more likely to use physical money than urban Canadians, Lemay said — which is where the Mint's role as not just a producer of coins, but as manager of the country's coin supply, comes in. This end-to-end oversight of the national inventory has helped ward off some of the problems other countries have encountered with their coin supplies during the pandemic, she added.
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