Answers
What the penny cost Canada
The penny died of overhead. By the end, producing one Canadian cent cost about 1.6 cents; the country paid more to make the coin than the coin was worth. The March 29, 2012 federal budget announced its elimination and estimated the change would save roughly $11 million a year in production and distribution.
Beyond the Mint's ledger were quieter costs. Retailers counted and rolled coins, banks shipped them, and billions of cents fell out of circulation into jars: minted, paid for, and parked. The last cent was struck on May 4, 2012, and distribution ended on February 4, 2013, when cash rounding took over at the till.
The economics carry one clean lesson: the penny's problem was never its meaning, it was its manufacturing. That is the opening the Paper Penny proposal walks through: a community voucher costs nearly nothing to produce, holds value only by voluntary local agreement, and proves itself with a QR ledger instead of metallurgy. Whether that idea deserves to exist is exactly what the proposal stage is for: the program is not live, no city has signed on, and it is not a Royal Canadian 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.