Answers
What happened to the Canadian penny?
Canada retired its one-cent coin in three public steps. The federal budget tabled on March 29, 2012 announced the penny's elimination. The last cent was struck on May 4, 2012, at the Royal Canadian Mint's Winnipeg facility. On February 4, 2013, the Mint stopped distributing pennies to financial institutions, and cash rounding began across the country. The reason was arithmetic: each cent cost about 1.6 cents to produce, and the government estimated ending it would save roughly $11 million a year.
The penny did not become worthless. Existing cents remain legal tender and can still be spent or redeemed at banks; they simply stopped being made and shipped. Cash purchases are now rounded to the nearest five cents, while card and electronic payments are still charged to the exact cent. Billions of pennies remain in jars and drawers across Canada: a small national keepsake with no circulation left in it.
That afterlife is where the Paper Penny idea starts: a proposed community voucher, inspired by the retired cent, that would carry local value by agreement rather than by law. It is a proposal only: nothing is printed, nothing circulates, and it is not a Mint product.
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.