Dear friends,
Have you ever seen Bugs Bunny, or Elmer Fudd, or probably even the Roadrunner?
How about Tweety Bird? I think these are all Loonie Tunes. The "Tunes" part isshort form for cartoons.
Here in Canada we have dollars. Each dollar is worth 100 pennies, just like the
USA. Inflation raised prices and a dollar bill would buy far less than it used
to buy when I was a kid! We also had many vending machines. Even some supermarkets, like the Extra Foods where Ben and I bought groceries today let you have
a cart to carry your groceries around in their store and to your car only if you
put $1.00 into a slot so that the cart will loosen from a long rank of carts all held one to the other by chains. When you bring the cart you used back you gets your $1.00 back, too.
So there was need for a tough dollar that could be used in parking meters, Coke
machines and super market cart slots, to name a few places. It isn't easy to put a fancy piece of paper such as a paper dollar into one of these slots. Hence
all paper dollars were replaced by fairly large, gold coloured coins. These coins bear the picture of a Loon on them. The Loon is a northern bird with a haunting cry, and is one of the symbols of Canada.
Canadians often have a wry "tongue in cheek" sense of humour, so almost immediately the dollar coin had a new name. It was called a Loonie. Nobody usually calls it anything else any more. Eventually the same thing happened to our paper $
2.00 bill. It also became a coin. This coin has a gold metal flat disk in the
centre surrounded by fairly wide silver metal rim. It is a little bigger than a
loonie. So, can you guess from what you know by now what we call it? No? We
call it a Toonie, of course! A play on the word "two", and rhymed to the name
of the $1.00 coin, Loonie. So what does that make? It makesLoonie Toonies. -- Which of course ultimately derived from Loonie-Tunes cartoons
. We make fun of our own money, you see.
Today our dollar rose again against the America dollar. It's at a 14-year high
of 88.39 cents. I suppose you think this make us proud? In a way it does. There are suggestions now that the Canadian dollar is even getting to be a bettersafe currency than the Swiss franc. In other words, the ultimate safe-haven currency. The loonie also has risen by more than 20 per cent against the Swiss franc in the past year. However Canada will likely need to become a net international creditor country before it can claim "full-fledged standing as a safe haven.
" But this appear to be only a matter of time. Canada's net foreign liabilities have been slashed to 12 per cent of GDP from more than 44 per cent in 1994.
I have a couple of thoughts about this. First, I hope we don't ever extend the
service of secret numbered accounts to dictators and criminals. Second, I wishthat there would be a world currency backed by a gold standard, instead of
certain country's currencies becoming "safe havens." This would do away with
speculating against various country's currencies and causing all kinds of
economic turmoil for them while fattening certain gambler type individual's pockets.
So, that's the story of our Loonie-Toonies, and I hope you found it interesting.
It's a story typical of the general Canadian stance in the world.
Warmly, Mary
