A Coin for a Modern World: Exploring the Story Behind Canada’s Toonie

Five Canadian artists were invited to present sketches of the coin. The selected winner was wildlife artist Brent Townsend, who sketched an adult male polar bear hunting on the ice floes along the coast at the start of the Arctic summer. The animal is alert, after hearing or seeing something unusual.

To ensure accuracy of the drawing, an expert in the field of northern wildlife and of the Canadian Wildlife Service was consulted. In a recent interview with Townsend, he recalls there being very few changes to his original design.

“I was aware of the criteria and the design is essentially the way I drew it.” Knowing that the design would be etched on an area that was about the size of a dime, and without the element of colour, Townsend had to relay as many characteristics of the bear as possible. This way, when seeing the coin, people could instantly recognize that it was a polar bear and not a grizzly or black bear.

The image of a polar bear is striking and so is the setting on which is it struck —a bi-metallic coin with a nickel outer ring and aluminum bronze core.

It was not the first bi-metallic coin the world had ever seen. Countries such as France, Italy, the United Kingdom and Finland among others had a bi-metallic coin in circulation. What set Canada apart was its ability to produce one that was thinner and lighter than those already in markets across the globe. To join the two parts, engineers at the Mint perfected a patented locking system designed to prevent the two parts from separating under normal circulating conditions.

The new coin was launched on February 19, 1996, and was quickly dubbed the “Toonie” by Canadians. Our Winnipeg facility struck 375 million two-dollar coins in 1996, and demand was so strong that there was no need to mint any new one-dollar coins for circulation between 1997-2002.

In the same year that the coin was introduced, a couple of reported cases of the core and outer ring separating emerged and is still asked by many visitors to the Mint today, “Is it true?”

From the time we produced the very first coin to today, the two-dollar coin continues to undergo rigorous testing. The middle of the coin can withstand up to 181 kilograms of pressure or about ten times the pressure the average human hand can exert. 

After almost 30 years of circulation, it is clear that the Toonie’s core does not separate from its outer ring under normal everyday use, and that the few cases reported in 1995 were isolated and did not involve normal uses of the coin.

A New Generation of Toonies

The Toonie has always been bi-metallic. From 1996 to 2012, a pure nickel outer ring surrounded an inner core made of 92% copper, 6% aluminium and 2% nickel.  In a drive to modernize Canada’s currency system, the Government of Canada announced in March, 2010, that the coin’s composition would change to multi-ply plated steel.  A process patented by the Mint that covers a steel core with alternating layers of different metals such as copper, nickel and brass.

Changing the composition represents a significant annual cost saving and allowed the Mint to introduce a number of advanced security features in their design. Since 2012, the outer ring became multi-ply nickel-plated steel and the inner core changed to multi-ply brass-plated aluminium bronze.

While these latest changes are permanent, there have been temporary changes to the coin’s design. Instances where Townsend’s portrait of a majestic polar have been replaced with special and commemorative designs.

The first special edition Toonie came in 1999 and featured an Inuit drummer to celebrate the founding of Nunavut. The second design change came a year later in 2000 as part of the Millennium coin series. Over the years and including Townsend’s iconic polar bear, over 20 different designs have appeared on the Toonie and we invite you to scroll through this timeline.