Canadian Coins Are Pretty COOL Eh?

Oh, Canada... The land of ice hockey, poutine, and Tim Horton's coffee has produced scores of beautiful coins that make collectors flip their toques.

- JOSHUA MCMORROW-HERNANDEZ

The catalog of Canadian coins goes back to the 1850s, with trade tokens, colonial pieces and provincial coinage stretching back further.

Much of the land now known as Canada was claimed by France in 1535 and started off as the colony of New France. The demand for beaver pelts in Europe drove much of the interest in exploring and colonizing the vast wilderness of upper North America over the next three centuries. Some of the major fur trade companies even issued tokens worth the value of a beaver pelt (or fractions thereof) and these pieces circulated among other types of privately issued tokens as well as legal-tender coinage from other countries well into the 19th century.

Britain claimed the colony of Canada in 1763 and Canada's confederation came in 1867, when the colonies of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Quebec and Ontario joined to become the Dominion of Canada. As the nation grew, so did its need for coinage, which was originally produced for Canada by the Royal Mint in London, with some coins also being produced at the private Heaton Mint in Birmingham, England.

Britain struck Canada's coins for a half century, from the time the first one-cent coins for circulation in 1858 until the opening of the Royal Canadian Mint in Ottawa in 1908.

By that point, the general cadence of Canada's coinage was well established, and it largely resembled the type of coinage system that had long before been adopted by the United States.

EXPLORING CANADA'S COINS

When the Mint in Ottawa went online, Canada was producing one-cent, five-cent, 10-cent, 25-cent and 50-cent coins. Silver dollars were authorized by the Dominion of Canada Currency Act of 1910, though only two pattern dollars were emitted the following year. Official production of circulating dollar coins didn't begin until 1935.