A Penny for the Pot

Canada, like the U.S., has a penny problem. Increasingly, in Canadian stores, either the costs are just rounded up when you get change (if you offer a $2 piece for a $1.87 purchase, you get 10 cents change) or a dish of pennies sits on the counter for you either to take from or add to. As in the U.S., there is agitation to end pennies (which now cost about 2 cents to make). According to a recent New Yorker article (March 31, p. 60), a Canadian credit union group has published a report encouraging the elimination of pennies as well as nickels. Noting that the Americans are having trouble letting go, the report warns that “Canada does not have to follow [the U.S.] example” because the U.S. is a very conservative society, as evidenced by its refusal to adopt the metric system and its insistence on having a one dollar bill.

I’m generally surprised when the Canadians offer what seems to me an unfair criticism of the U.S., because there seem to be so many fair ones. But here I must take issue with the credit unions, although not about the metric system. I have more or less learned to deal with it in the past two decades, but I would note that every grocery stores in Canada that I’ve been in posts all meat and produce prices in metric AND what I think of as real weight measures, suggesting an attachment to the old that the credit union group has not noticed. Granted, the highway signs are all metric except at the border, where they encourage Americans slipping northward to try to keep in mind that 80 kph is the same as 48 mph. This is clearly advice only for the mathematically adept since it doesn’t offer any other equivalencies nor a conversion factor for easy use.

But the dollar bill thing is another matter. It is true that Canada has no paper dollar and, during my time here, it gave up on its two dollar bill. However, the U.S. lost its two dollar bill long ago, and it has been entirely unsuccessful in launching a one dollar coin and has not even contemplated a $2 coin. Canada has both, a fact that is ever present when you pick up your purse. Failing to give up the one dollar bill is not anywhere near as unfortunate a move (conservative or otherwise) as choosing to inflict large and relatively heavy one and two dollar coins on one’s citizens.

In Canada, the little coins (nickel, dime, and quarter) all look pretty much alike in terms of format, although they differ in size, as do the U.S. ones. However, I can never tell whether I have a nickel or a quarter in my hand when I glance at change, unless there is one of each close to each other and thus I can discriminate between their sizes. A nickel has a beaver on it and a quarter has the fabulous Queen E upon it (and there are new quarters that have a wide range of pictures of I do not much know what), but you don’t see the pictures so much as you see the similar style of engraving. This means that when shopping in Canada, I am always handing the clerk a handful of change hoping she can make some sense of it before the people behind me get too restless. It is part of being a permanent tourist and a little old lady.

The tiresome dollar and two dollar coins are something else altogether. The one dollar is kind of gold colored and features a loon. It is called a loonie. My sister was struck speechless once when visiting me in Canada and, out on her own, was accosted by a native who asked her, “Do you have change for a loonie?” The original two dollar coin had a polar bear on it and featured a ring of silver and a ring of gold. Now there are variant pictures for it, as well. Before the two dollar coin came out, there was considerable to-do about what it was to be called. A dubloonie? Or, a toonie? Toonie won out. What can I say?

Canadians may not be conservative but in this case they are just not sensible, is my view. And my wallet bears witness to that. Especially chosen to provide me—as a two country roamer--with four separate pockets for paper bills and two separate pockets for coins, it needs a heavy duty rubber band to keep it closed and a firm grip to keep it from plunging to the ground whenever I pick it up. Filled with way too many loonies and toonies, and way too few Canadian one dollar bills.

When Canadians Say 'Eh?'

Before I moved up here, I didn’t know all that much about Canada: the standard stuff: hockey, ‘Eh?,’ maple leaves. ‘Tukes’ had not penetrated my consciousness, even though I went to college on the U.S. side of the Canadian border just south of the Saint Lawrence River. Maybe they hadn’t taken to wearing them in the 50’s: I don’t know. One of our early trips across the border from Point Roberts to Canada (and indeed the only even mildly unpleasant border experience I’ve ever had going into Canada) involved my stopping first at the Point Roberts post office where there was an unexpected package for me from a friend, and which I picked up and put in the back seat of the car. Then I proceeded to cross the border to do some mild shopping. ‘What’s in the package?’ inquired the Canadian border agent. “Got me,” I replied. “I just picked it up at the post office.” “Do you think you can bring a sealed package across the border when you don’t even know what is in it? Take that package home before you cross the border. Do you not understand that Canada is a different country?”

Of course I did, in a sense. I mean Canada had already refused to let me live there permanently, so it apparently wasn’t the U.S. where I do get to live permanently. But in a larger sense, he was probably right. Canadians were just us, but they said ‘Eh?’

Yet another of life’s truths that I had wrong. Canadians are really quite different from Americans but they don’t, at least as far as I have heard, say ‘Eh?’. Maybe you hear it on Canadian TV, radio, or movies, when it’s used quite self-consciously; and maybe you hear it in Eastern Canada, about which I know nothing. But you pretty much don’t hear it in B.C. Hockey? Yes, all the time, everywhere. Maple leaves? Plenty of those, too, whether the real ones or iconic ones. But no ‘Eh?’ What you do hear, though, is a flat a in all Latinate words that, pretty much, Americans pronounce with a broad a. So, you go to dinner and they serve you pasta, the first syllable of which rhymes with ‘fast.’ Or you join them at a concert where a cantata is being performed. And the second syllable of cantata rhymes with ‘fat.’ Across the board, they use that flat a instead of the broad a that Americans would use. Only after 16 years, do I find myself asking for a little more pasta, rhymes with fast-uh. But it still sounds weird to me, even when I say it spontaneously.

Another thing about Canadians that is very different from Americans is that they know the relative and actual value of the U.S. and Canadian dollars. Of course, knowing what it is—and right now, for the first time in decades, the Canadian dollar is worth more than the U.S. dollar: i.e., one U.S. dollar will buy you only 95-98 Canadian cents—doesn’t make it possible for you to do much about it. But it significantly affects where you buy what you buy. A few years ago, before the Bush Administration destroyed the U.S. economy, the U.S. dollar was very strong: one U.S. dollar could buy $1.50 Canadian. If I deposited a $1,000 U.S. check each month, say, to cover my expenses in Canada, my bank account would get $1,500 Canadian dollars. Now, it gets about $960 Canadian dollars. So everything in Canada has become much more expensive for me and I buy as little there as I can, but everything in the U.S. has become much less expensive for Canadians, and they are pouring over the main U.S. border to enliven the shopping malls. This is a zero sum game, I suppose, but now I am on the down side of the curve; before, they were. They're vacationing in California; Americans are not vacationing in Vancouver.

But it is one thing that makes Canadians different and, now, I am different like them: I’m acutely aware of the value of the U.S. dollar and how it affects my every day life. That’s something, eh?