The Loonie

The Canadian loon is not a happy bird. The bird has four separate calls, which are the tremolo, the wail, the yodel, and the hoot. According to the Canadian Encyclopedia, the tremolo sounds like a crazy laugh and is used for a variety of purposes, such as to signal alarm or worry or to denote annoyance.

The loon, which we informally called the loonie, is also the official Canadian one­dollar coin. It’s not a happy bird either. It unfortunately does not wail or yodel or hoot. Considering its current value, it should. You might say it comes to our pockets without any preliminary warning. But it shares with its woodland namesake the ability to inspire melancholy and, for the holders of any great number of loonies, this same capacity for instigating great annoyance.

Another citation from the encyclopedia informs us, and I quote, “loons have difficulty taking flight.” I don’t know how much of a naturalist Paul Martin is, but I suspect he’s familiar with this characteristic. Diving is what loons and loonies do. And at roughly sixty cents to the real dollar, our loonie is as good at going underwater as any of the great banshees of the northern lakes.

We should wonder at any sovereign state that names its fundamental currency after a crazy cheap bird. The Americans go for better birds when they name their coins. The eagle is a noble creature. It doesn’t hoot or wail or yodel. The eagle flies. Their bird is an artist of flight. Ours, a fish with feathers.

And their coin is in the same category. The eagle is real money. It’s ten imperial American dollars. The loonie, our loonie, is essentially a fat quarter, well on the way to being worth a thin dime. It’s a ridiculous currency, embarrassing to ask for, embarrassing to receive. It’s all weight and no value. All jingle and no juice.

People suspected the loonie was the wrong way to go from the beginning. A coin is always that, just change. When we dropped the one-dollar bill, it was really an admission that the Canadian dollar wasn’t worth its own ink. Same thing with the deuce or the two-dollar bill which has an even more irritating name than the loonie. It’s just a damn toonie. If we were to go by the names, Romper Room is in charge of the Canadian Mint.

In all this downward turbulence, Canadians have adjusted. Our pennies are useless. Our quarters are dimes, and I’m not sure what the nickel is for any more, except as a recurring disappointment at parking meters. The five­dollar bill is really our one dollar bill. We all know this. It’s just not official. And we know too that the sad loonies and toonies are only a step away from the Monopoly board.

So when the loonie goes down in international markets, we have no one but ourselves to blame. You cannot name, I repeat, you cannot name your fundamental currency after a sad, tawdry, cheap bird with a reputation for craziness to boot and expect the international money markets to do anything but smirk and put it on the endangered list. The Canadian dollar is worth sixty cents. Is this a country or the world’s biggest discount house?

–The National