Answers
How cash rounding works in Canada
Since February 4, 2013, the day the Royal Canadian Mint stopped distributing pennies, cash transactions in Canada have been rounded to the nearest five cents. The federal guideline is symmetric: totals ending in 1 or 2 round down to 0; 3 or 4 round up to 5; 6 or 7 round down to 5; 8 or 9 round up to 10. Rounding applies only to the final total of a cash payment, after taxes, never to individual items.
Pay by card, cheque, or any electronic method and you are charged to the exact cent. Pennies themselves remain legal tender, so a customer who tenders exact cents can still be accommodated. Because the scheme rounds up and down evenly, neither shoppers nor merchants gain over time; the cents simply wash out.
The Paper Penny proposal takes an interest in those vanishing cents: it imagines a community voucher, inspired by the retired coin, that gives the smallest unit of Canadian habit a local, voluntary afterlife. To be clear, that is a design idea, not a payment system: the program is proposed, nothing is in circulation, and rounding at the till works exactly as described above with or without it.
The Paper Penny is a proposed program. No city has adopted it yet. Owen Sound, Ontario is the proposed first pilot.
Paper Penny is a proposed community project by Mike Seiler (mikeseiler.ca), built on the map.ca stack. It is not legal tender, not a Royal Canadian Mint product, and not yet live in any city. The network map lives at PennyMap.ca.