A History of the Loonie, in Eight Pieces

England took a different tack than Spain, outlawing the minting of currency in its North American colonies. Since many of the pounds and shillings it sent across the Atlantic went right back to England to purchase trade goods, colonists substituted Joachimsthal dollars, French crowns, and Spanish reals. The eight-real silver coin was the most abundant. Mintedby the millions in Mexico, they became known as “pieces of eight” and, because they were almost the same size and weight as the Joachimsthal coins, as “Mexican dollars.” To make change, American colonists would cut the eight-real coins into four wedge-shaped “bits,” each worth a quarter of a dollar. The US adopted the Mexican dollar as its official unit of currency in 1785.


During the early nineteenth century, the monetary system in Upper and Lower Canada was based on British currency,which made for complicationsgiven the shortage of pounds and shillings. In 1813, resourceful colonial authorities in Prince Edward Island punched out the centres of a thousand Mexican silver dollars to make two coins: a donut-shaped “holey dollar” worth five shillings, and the remaining centre plug, worth one shilling.The dollars-to-donuts plan failed within a year, because the coins proved too easy to counterfeit.

The Province of Canada adopted the dollar in 1857, a decision that expanded to the entire Dominion upon Confederation. But with bank notes circulating widely alongside US and Mexican silver dollars, it would take decades for Canada to bother minting its own dollar coin.


In 1935, to commemorate the silver jubilee of King George V’s accession, Toronto sculptor Emanuel Hahn was commissioned to design a silver dollar.

His composition featured a voyageur and an aboriginal paddling a canoe loaded with trade bales—one of which bears the letters HB, for the Hudson’s Bay Company—against a background of northern lights. Hahn’s evocative image endured, remaining on silver (and later nickel) dollar coins until 1987.


During the mid-1980s, Canadadecided to switch from paperdollars to coins. Dies for a bronze-plated version of the voyageur coin were cast in Ottawa and prepared for shipment to Winnipeg to be minted in November 1986. But the dies were lost in transit (the story goes that the courier was not asked to show ID) and werenever seen again. Fearing counterfeit, the Royal Canadian Mint readied an alternate design, by Robert-Ralph Carmichael, depicting a loon on the back.

The new coin reached the Canadian public on June 30, 1987. Just as ancient Athenians dubbed their common coin the “owl,” Canadians began calling their new dollar the “loonie.” Whether future civilizations will conclude that the loon was the Queen’s sacred bird remains to be seen.