Shaw Communications
Shaw Communications Inc. is a Canadian telecommunications company which provides telephone, Internet and mobile services all backed by a fibre optic network. Headquartered in Calgary, Shaw provides services in British Columbia and Alberta, with smaller systems in Saskatchewan and Northern Ontario. Through its subsidiary Freedom Mobile, Shaw provides mobile services in urban areas of British Columbia and Southern Ontario; the company's chief competitor is Telus Corporation. Shaw was founded as Capital Cable Television Company, Ltd. in Edmonton, Alberta, in 1966, by JR Shaw. It was a subsidiary of Shawcor, JR's father's business, but the business was split from Shawcor in the 1970s; the company changed its name to Shaw Cablesystems Ltd. and went public on the TSX in 1983. The company grew during the 1980s and 1990s through acquisitions of firms including Classicomm in the Toronto area, Access Communications in Nova Scotia, Fundy Cable in New Brunswick, Trillium Cable in Ontario, Telecable in Saskatchewan, Greater Winnipeg Cablevision, Videon Cablesystems of Winnipeg, which had itself acquired Vidéotron's assets in Alberta.
However, two swaps, in 1994 and 2001, with Rogers Cable have resulted in its assets being restricted to Western Canada and a few areas of Northern Ontario. In 1999, Shaw spun out its media properties into a second publicly-traded company, Corus Entertainment. In 2001 the Moffat family sold Videon Cablesystems to Shaw. Prior to 2003, Shaw owned cable systems in the United States owned by Moffat Communications, serving six communities in Florida, the Houston, Texas suburbs of Kingwood, Lake Conroe and Lake Livingston. In February 2003, the Florida systems would be sold to Time Warner Cable, while the Texas systems were sold to Cequel III, as part of its then-Cebridge Connections subsidiary. In 2008, Shaw entered the AWS spectrum auction with the intention of becoming a wireless phone provider; the auction ended July 2008, giving Shaw Communications enough spectrum to build a wireless network in its home provinces of British Columbia, Saskatchewan and Ontario. This spectrum went unused and was sold to Rogers Communications in January 2013.
In July 2009, Shaw announced its acquisition of Mountain Cablevision. However, the suit was dismissed by the Ontario Superior Court; the purchase was approved by the CRTC on October 22, 2009. The acquisition was Shaw's first cable property east of Sault Ste. Marie since the 2001 swaps with Rogers and Cogeco. Shaw's re-entry into Southern Ontario would be short-lived, as its Hamilton system would be resold to Rogers in January 2013 as part of a deal which saw unused wireless spectrum sold to the company, saw Rogers sell its stake in specialty channel TVtropolis. On April 30, 2009, Shaw announced a deal to acquire three television stations — CHWI-TV in Windsor, Ontario, CKNX-TV in Wingham, Ontario and CKX-TV in Brandon, Manitoba — from CTVglobemedia. CTV had indicated that it would shut down the stations, all of which were incurring extensive financial losses in the year if a buyer could not be found, had placed them on the market at a price of just $1 each. However, it was reported on June 30, 2009 that Shaw had backed out of the deal and was declining to complete the purchase.
CHWI-TV would remain on the air. In February 2010, Shaw announced an agreement with the financially troubled Canwest, whereby Shaw would buy an 80% voting interest, 20% equity interest, in the restructured entity of Canwest, pending approvals from the CRTC and others. Three months following negotiations with rival bidders, the company said it would purchase the entirety of Canwest's broadcasting assets, including the interests in the CW Media subsidiary held by Goldman Sachs Capital Partners. Canwest's newspapers were sold separately to Postmedia Network; the acquisition was completed on October 27, 2010, after CRTC approval for the sale was announced on October 22, forming the Shaw Media division. In November 2012, Shaw underwent a corporate re-branding, introducing an updated logo and slogan, along with a new promotional campaign featuring animated robots that live in a representation of Shaw's infrastructure, depicting them as being responsible for how their services work; the campaign was designed by the Vancouver-based agency Rethink, who were responsible for Bell Canada's beaver characters Frank and Gordon.
In April 2013, Shaw Business Solutions took over Enmax's Envision subsidiary, which had built a fiber-optic network throughout Calgary. The acquisition was completed for $225 Million. In 2014, Shaw partnered with Rogers Communications to launch Shomi, a subscription video on demand service. In February 2015, Shaw Communications announced that they would close operations for service call centers in Edmonton and Kelowna, consolidate operations in Victoria, Vancouver and Montreal. 1,600 of Shaw's 14,000 employees were affected by cuts. The company offered affected employees the option to relocate to its centralized offices, apply for a new job at their location, or leave the co
Bell Canada
Bell Canada is a Canadian telecommunications company headquartered in Montreal, Canada. It is the incumbent local exchange carrier for telephone and DSL Internet services in most of Canada east of Saskatchewan and in the northern territories, a major competitive local exchange carrier for enterprise customers in the western provinces, its subsidiary Bell Aliant provides services in the Atlantic provinces. It provides mobile service through its Bell Mobility subsidiary, television through its Bell TV and Bell Fibe TV subsidiaries. Bell Canada's principal competitors are Rogers Communications in Ontario and Shaw Communications in Western Canada, Quebecor and Telus in Quebec; the company serves over 13 million phone lines and is headquartered at the Campus Bell complex in Montreal. Bell Canada is one of the main assets of the holding company BCE Inc. known as Bell Canada Enterprises. In addition to the Bell Canada telecommunications properties, BCE owns Bell Media and holds significant interests in the Montreal Canadiens ice hockey club and Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment, owner of several Toronto professional sports franchises.
BCE ranked number 262 on the 2011 edition of the Forbes Global 2000 list. Bell Canada has been one of Canada's most important and most powerful companies and, in 1975, was listed as the fifth largest in the country; the company is named after the inventor of the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell, who co-founded Bell Telephone Company in Boston, Massachusetts. Bell Canada operated as the Canadian subsidiary of the Bell System from 1880 to 1975. However, unlike the other regional Bell operating companies, Bell Canada had its own research and development labs. In the mid-1870s Alexander Graham Bell, Scottish-born but lived in Canada, invented an analogue electromagnetic telecommunication device that could transmit and receive human speech. In March 1876 he patented his invention in the United States under the title of "Improvement In Telegraphy", his device adopted the name now used worldwide, the telephone. Bell patented it in Canada and transferred 75% of the Canadian patent rights to his father, Alexander Melville Bell, with the remaining 25% of the Canadian interest being awarded to Boston telephone manufacturer Charles Williams Jr. in exchange for 1,000 telephones to be provided to the Canadian market, an order that could not be fulfilled due to surging demand in the United States.
For a few years, the senior Bell and his friend and business associate Reverend Thomas Philip Henderson collected royalties from the lease of telephones to customers in the limited late-1870s Canadian market, who either operated their own private telephone lines or subscribed to a third party telecommunications service provider. In 1879 Bell's father sold his Canadian rights to the National Bell Telephone Company, formed in Boston, Massachusetts earlier that year by the merger of the Bell Telephone Company and the New England Telephone and Telegraph Company, which in 1880 reorganized as the American Bell Telephone Company, initiating the Bell System; that same year the Canadian division was renamed to "The Bell Telephone Company of Canada Ltd." to be headed by U. S. executive Charles Fleetford Sise from Chicago who served as its first general manager. The first supplier of telephones to Bell was a company established by Thomas C. Cowherd and his son James H. Cowherd, in a three-storey brick building in Brantford, creating Canada's first telephone factory.
Thomas and James had been good friends of Alexander Graham Bell, providing stovepipe wire with which Bell conducted his early telephone experiments from his father's home in Tutelo Heights and building some 2,398 telephones to Bell's specifications for the Canadian market until James Cowherd's untimely death from tuberculosis in 1881. With a government-granted monopoly on Canadian long-distance telephone service, The Bell Telephone Company of Canada was serving 237,000 subscribers by 1914. Since its early years The Bell Telephone Company of Canada, Ltd. had been known colloquially as "The Bell" or "Bell Telephone". On March 7, 1968, Canadian federal legislation renamed The Bell Telephone Company of Canada, Ltd. to Bell Canada. Bell Canada extended lines from Nova Scotia to the foot of the Rocky Mountains in what is now Alberta. However, most of the attention given to meeting demand for service focused on major cities in Ontario and the Maritime Provinces. During the late 19th century, Bell sold its Atlantic operations in the three Maritime provinces, where many small independent companies operated and came under the ownership of three provincial companies.
Newfoundland and Labrador joined Canada with several private companies, a government operation, transferred to the control of Canadian National Railways. Bell acquired interests in all Atlantic companies during the early 1960s, starting with Newfoundland Telephones on July 24, 1962. Bell acquired controlling interest in Maritime Telephone and Telegraph Company known as MT&T, which owned PEI-based Island Telephone, in Bruncorp, the parent company of NBTel in 1966; the purchase of MT&T was made despite efforts of the Nova Scotia legislature on September 10, 1966, to limit the voting power of any shareholder to 1000 votes. Bell-owned MT&T absorbed some 120 independent companies. Bell-owned NewTel purchased the CNR-owned Terra Nova Tel in 1988. Newtel, Bruncorp, MT&T and I
Vancouver
Vancouver is a coastal seaport city in western Canada, located in the Lower Mainland region of British Columbia. As the most populous city in the province, the 2016 census recorded 631,486 people in the city, up from 603,502 in 2011; the Greater Vancouver area had a population of 2,463,431 in 2016, making it the third-largest metropolitan area in Canada. Vancouver has the highest population density in Canada with over 5,400 people per square kilometre, which makes it the fifth-most densely populated city with over 250,000 residents in North America behind New York City, San Francisco, Mexico City according to the 2011 census. Vancouver is one of the most ethnically and linguistically diverse cities in Canada according to that census. 30% of the city's inhabitants are of Chinese heritage. Vancouver is classed as a Beta global city. Vancouver is named as one of the top five worldwide cities for livability and quality of life, the Economist Intelligence Unit acknowledged it as the first city ranked among the top-ten of the world's most well-living cities for five consecutive years.
Vancouver has hosted many international conferences and events, including the 1954 British Empire and Commonwealth Games, UN Habitat I, Expo 86, the World Police and Fire Games in 1989 and 2009. In 2014, following thirty years in California, the TED conference made Vancouver its indefinite home. Several matches of the 2015 FIFA Women's World Cup were played in Vancouver, including the final at BC Place; the original settlement, named Gastown, grew up on clearcuts on the west edge of the Hastings Mill logging sawmill's property, where a makeshift tavern had been set up on a plank between two stumps and the proprietor, Gassy Jack, persuaded the curious millworkers to build him a tavern, on July 1, 1867. From that first enterprise, other stores and some hotels appeared along the waterfront to the west. Gastown became formally laid out as a registered townsite dubbed Granville, B. I.. As part of the land and political deal whereby the area of the townsite was made the railhead of the Canadian Pacific Railway, it was renamed "Vancouver" and incorporated shortly thereafter as a city, in 1886.
By 1887, the Canadian Pacific transcontinental railway was extended westward to the city to take advantage of its large natural seaport to the Pacific Ocean, which soon became a vital link in a trade route between the Orient / East Asia, Eastern Canada, Europe. As of 2014, Port Metro Vancouver is the third-largest port by tonnage in the Americas, 27th in the world, the busiest and largest in Canada, the most diversified port in North America. While forestry remains its largest industry, Vancouver is well known as an urban centre surrounded by nature, making tourism its second-largest industry. Major film production studios in Vancouver and nearby Burnaby have turned Greater Vancouver and nearby areas into one of the largest film production centres in North America, earning it the nickname "Hollywood North"; the city takes its name from George Vancouver, who explored the inner harbour of Burrard Inlet in 1792 and gave various places British names. The family name "Vancouver" itself originates from the Dutch "Van Coevorden", denoting somebody from the city of Coevorden, Netherlands.
The explorer's ancestors came to England "from Coevorden", the origin of the name that became "Vancouver". Archaeological records indicate that Aboriginal people were living in the "Vancouver" area from 8,000 to 10,000 years ago; the city is located in the traditional and presently unceded territories of the Squamish and Tseil-Waututh peoples of the Coast Salish group. They had villages in various parts of present-day Vancouver, such as Stanley Park, False Creek, Point Grey and near the mouth of the Fraser River. Europeans became acquainted with the area of the future Vancouver when José María Narváez of Spain explored the coast of present-day Point Grey and parts of Burrard Inlet in 1791—although one author contends that Francis Drake may have visited the area in 1579; the explorer and North West Company trader Simon Fraser and his crew became the first-known Europeans to set foot on the site of the present-day city. In 1808, they travelled from the east down the Fraser River as far as Point Grey.
The Fraser Gold Rush of 1858 brought over 25,000 men from California, to nearby New Westminster on the Fraser River, on their way to the Fraser Canyon, bypassing what would become Vancouver. Vancouver is among British Columbia's youngest cities. A sawmill established at Moodyville in 1863, began the city's long relationship with logging, it was followed by mills owned by Captain Edward Stamp on the south shore of the inlet. Stamp, who had begun logging in the Port Alberni area, first attempted to run a mill at Brockton Point, but difficult currents and reefs forced the relocation of the operation in 1867 to a point near the foot of Dunlevy Street; this mill, known as the Hastings Mill, became the nucleus. The mill's central role in the city waned after the arrival of the Canadian Pacific Railway in the 1880s, it remained important to the local economy until it closed in the 1920s. The settlement which came to be called Gastown grew around
Hillcrest Mall
Hillcrest Mall, or Hillcrest, is a 54,419-square-metre enclosed shopping centre located in the town of Richmond Hill, Canada, on the northwest corner of Yonge Street and Carrville Road. It has 135 shops and restaurants. Hillcrest Mall was built on a 19-hectare lot on the northwest corner of Yonge Street and Carrville Road. Architectural drawings were produced by Bregman and Hamann, the interior design by Robert Meiklejohn; the project was a joint venture of Greater York Group. Lighting at the mall was designed with input from the David Dunlap Observatory to mitigate light pollution; this included minimal signage, shielded lights in the parking lot, a light-absorbing parking lot surface. It opened on August 8, 1974 with four anchor stores Simpsons, Sears, a Loblaws supermarket, it had over 100 stores occupying 50,000 m2 at its grand opening, during which the first 10,000 Simpsons patrons received a rose, a symbolic gesture reflecting Richmond Hill's past status as the rose growing capital of Canada.
Simpsons used a rose in its local advertising. Hillcrest Mall held a draw, the winner of, given a two-week all expenses paid trip to Mexico; the central square featured four ficus trees imported from Florida under a vaulted ceiling. The market court was a food court with picnic gaslight lamps. A 250-seat auditorium with stage and kitchen was part of the design, was made available for community activities; the auditorium was used for fashion shows. A five auditorium movie theatre operated by Cineplex Odeon Corporation opened in October 1980, with a total seating capacity of 519. Hudson's Bay Company acquired Simpsons in 1978, by 1991 had rebranded the anchor store as The Bay. Zellers opened in the mall in 1998, acquiring the anchor retail space when its parent HBC purchased the assets of Kmart Canada in May 1998. HBC leased the retail space occupied by Sears at the southern end of the mall after Sears did not renew its lease, used it for Hudson Bay's Men's Store and Home; the mall underwent extensive renovations in 2000.
In late 2002, construction of a separate building in the northeast corner of the mall's parking lot was completed. In 2006, a farmers' market was established on the premises, operating from the mall's parking lot two days a week. Oxford Properties bought Hillcrest Mall from Cadillac Fairview in April 2011. In 2011, HBC sold the leases of most of its Zellers stores to Target Corporation. In January 2015, Target announced the liquidation of all its Canadian stores and closed in mid 2015; the lease was acquired by landlord Oxford Properties. The space was redeveloped and jointly leased to discount retailers Marshalls and HomeSense, which opened in September 2018. In 2013, an application was made to Richmond Hill Town Council to exempt the mall from the Retail Business Holidays Act so that it may open on six public holidays: New Year's Day, Family Day, Good Friday, Victoria Day, Canada Day, Labour Day, Thanksgiving; the holiday exemption application was accepted, the mall now only closes on Easter Sunday and Christmas.
On September 12, 2015, Hudson's Bay expanded anchor store was reopened. The $125 million project expanded the store by 7,500 m2 of retail space to 11,000 m2 total, into, merged its "Men's Store and Home"; the vacated anchor space was reconstructed for other tenants, which by the end of 2016 included Sporting Life, H&M, Pandora. On October 24, 2017, Hillcrest announced that they would put Marshalls, HomeSense and Old Navy stores in the former Target space in November 2018 along with a major interior renovation; the mall’s interior got a refresh with new floors, washrooms, upgraded food court, new entrances 1 & 6, completed by October 2018. Several large retailers used to be located at Hillcrest Mall: Kmart Closed in 1998 and replaced with Zellers Zellers - Opened in 1998. Replaced by Target. Target - Opened in 2013, liquidated and closed in mid-2015. Replaced by North expansion Sears Closed in 1986. Replaced with Hudson's Bay Men's Store and Home The Bay Men's Store and Home - closed in 2015, replaced by south expansionThe York Regional Police Community Resource Centre was located in the mall, has now relocated to the southwest corner of Elgin Mills Road West and Yonge Street.
Hillcrest Mall
Mobile phone
A mobile phone, cell phone, cellphone, or hand phone, sometimes shortened to mobile, cell or just phone, is a portable telephone that can make and receive calls over a radio frequency link while the user is moving within a telephone service area. The radio frequency link establishes a connection to the switching systems of a mobile phone operator, which provides access to the public switched telephone network. Modern mobile telephone services use a cellular network architecture, therefore, mobile telephones are called cellular telephones or cell phones, in North America. In addition to telephony, 2000s-era mobile phones support a variety of other services, such as text messaging, MMS, Internet access, short-range wireless communications, business applications, video games, digital photography. Mobile phones offering only those capabilities are known as feature phones; the first handheld mobile phone was demonstrated by John F. Mitchell and Martin Cooper of Motorola in 1973, using a handset weighing c. 2 kilograms.
In 1979, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone launched the world's first cellular network in Japan. In 1983, the DynaTAC 8000x was the first commercially available handheld mobile phone. From 1983 to 2014, worldwide mobile phone subscriptions grew to over seven billion—enough to provide one for every person on Earth. In first quarter of 2016, the top smartphone developers worldwide were Samsung and Huawei, smartphone sales represented 78 percent of total mobile phone sales. For feature phones as of 2016, the largest were Samsung and Alcatel. A handheld mobile radio telephone service was envisioned in the early stages of radio engineering. In 1917, Finnish inventor Eric Tigerstedt filed a patent for a "pocket-size folding telephone with a thin carbon microphone". Early predecessors of cellular phones included analog radio communications from trains; the race to create portable telephone devices began after World War II, with developments taking place in many countries. The advances in mobile telephony have been traced in successive "generations", starting with the early zeroth-generation services, such as Bell System's Mobile Telephone Service and its successor, the Improved Mobile Telephone Service.
These 0G systems were not cellular, supported few simultaneous calls, were expensive. The first handheld cellular mobile phone was demonstrated by John F. Mitchell and Martin Cooper of Motorola in 1973, using a handset weighing 2 kilograms; the first commercial automated cellular network analog was launched in Japan by Nippon Telegraph and Telephone in 1979. This was followed in 1981 by the simultaneous launch of the Nordic Mobile Telephone system in Denmark, Finland and Sweden. Several other countries followed in the early to mid-1980s; these first-generation systems could support far more simultaneous calls but still used analog cellular technology. In 1983, the DynaTAC 8000x was the first commercially available handheld mobile phone. In 1991, the second-generation digital cellular technology was launched in Finland by Radiolinja on the GSM standard; this sparked competition in the sector as the new operators challenged the incumbent 1G network operators. Ten years in 2001, the third generation was launched in Japan by NTT DoCoMo on the WCDMA standard.
This was followed by 3.5G, 3G+ or turbo 3G enhancements based on the high-speed packet access family, allowing UMTS networks to have higher data transfer speeds and capacity. By 2009, it had become clear that, at some point, 3G networks would be overwhelmed by the growth of bandwidth-intensive applications, such as streaming media; the industry began looking to data-optimized fourth-generation technologies, with the promise of speed improvements up to ten-fold over existing 3G technologies. The first two commercially available technologies billed as 4G were the WiMAX standard, offered in North America by Sprint, the LTE standard, first offered in Scandinavia by TeliaSonera. 5G is a technology and term used in research papers and projects to denote the next major phase in mobile telecommunication standards beyond the 4G/IMT-Advanced standards. The term 5G is not used in any specification or official document yet made public by telecommunication companies or standardization bodies such as 3GPP, WiMAX Forum or ITU-R.
New standards beyond 4G are being developed by standardization bodies, but they are at this time seen as under the 4G umbrella, not for a new mobile generation. Smartphones have a number of distinguishing features; the International Telecommunication Union measures those with Internet connection, which it calls Active Mobile-Broadband subscriptions. In the developed world, smartphones have now overtaken the usage of earlier mobile systems. However, in the developing world, they account for around 50% of mobile telephony. Feature phone is a term used as a retronym to describe mobile phones which are limited in capabilities in contrast to a modern smartphone. Feature phones provide voice calling and text messaging functionality, in addition to basic multimedia and Internet capabilities, other services offered by the user's wireless service provider. A feature phone has additional functions over and above a basic mobile phone, only capable of voice calling and text messaging. Feature phones and basic mobile phones tend to use a proprietary, custom-designed software and user interface.
By contrast, smartphones use a mobile operating system that shares common traits across devices. There are Orthodox Jewish religious re
Canadian dollar
The Canadian dollar is the currency of Canada. It is abbreviated with the dollar sign $, or sometimes Can$ or C$ to distinguish it from other dollar-denominated currencies, it is divided into 100 cents. Owing to the image of a loon on the one-dollar coin, the currency is sometimes referred to as the loonie by foreign exchange traders and analysts, as it is by Canadians in general, or huard in French. Accounting for 2% of all global reserves, the Canadian dollar is the fifth most held reserve currency in the world, behind the U. S. dollar, the euro, the yen and the pound sterling. The Canadian dollar is popular with central banks because of Canada's relative economic soundness, the Canadian government's strong sovereign position, the stability of the country's legal and political systems; the 1850s were a decade of wrangling over whether to adopt a sterling monetary system or a decimal monetary system based on the US dollar. The British North American provinces, for reasons of practicality in relation to the increasing trade with the neighbouring United States, had a desire to assimilate their currencies with the American unit, but the imperial authorities in London still preferred sterling as the sole currency throughout the British Empire.
The British North American provinces nonetheless adopted currencies tied to the American dollar. In 1841, the Province of Canada adopted a new system based on the Halifax rating; the new Canadian pound was equal to four US dollars, making one pound sterling equal to 1 pound, 4 shillings, 4 pence Canadian. Thus, the new Canadian pound was worth 5.3 pence sterling. In 1851, the Parliament of the Province of Canada passed an act for the purposes of introducing a pound sterling unit in conjunction with decimal fractional coinage; the idea was that the decimal coins would correspond to exact amounts in relation to the U. S. dollar fractional coinage. In response to British concerns, in 1853 an act of the Parliament of the Province of Canada introduced the gold standard into the colony, based on both the British gold sovereign and the American gold eagle coins; this gold standard was introduced with the gold sovereign being legal tender at £1 = US$4.86 2⁄3. No coinage was provided for under the 1853 act.
Sterling coinage was made legal tender and all other silver coins were demonetized. The British government in principle allowed for a decimal coinage but held out the hope that a sterling unit would be chosen under the name of "royal". However, in 1857, the decision was made to introduce a decimal coinage into the Province of Canada in conjunction with the U. S. dollar unit. Hence, when the new decimal coins were introduced in 1858, the colony's currency became aligned with the U. S. currency, although the British gold sovereign continued to remain legal tender at the rate of £1 = 4.86 2⁄3 right up until the 1990s. In 1859, Canadian colonial postage stamps were issued with decimal denominations for the first time. In 1861, Canadian postage stamps were issued with the denominations shown in cents. In 1860, the colonies of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia followed the Province of Canada in adopting a decimal system based on the U. S. dollar unit. Newfoundland went decimal in 1865, but unlike the Province of Canada, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, it decided to adopt a unit based on the Spanish dollar rather than on the U.
S. dollar, there was a slight difference between these two units. The U. S. dollar was created in 1792 on the basis of the average weight of a selection of worn Spanish dollars. As such, the Spanish dollar was worth more than the U. S. dollar, the Newfoundland dollar, until 1895, was worth more than the Canadian dollar. The Colony of British Columbia adopted the British Columbia dollar as its currency in 1865, at par with the Canadian dollar; when British Columbia joined Confederation in 1871, the Canadian dollar replaced the British Columbia dollar. In 1871, Prince Edward Island went decimal within the U. S. dollar unit and introduced coins for 1¢. However, the currency of Prince Edward Island was absorbed into the Canadian system shortly afterwards, when Prince Edward Island joined the Dominion of Canada in 1873. In 1867, the provinces of Canada, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia united in a federation named Canada and the three currencies were merged into the Canadian dollar; the Canadian Parliament passed the Uniform Currency Act in April 1871, tying up loose ends as to the currencies of the various provinces and replacing them with a common Canadian dollar.
The gold standard was temporarily abandoned during the First World War and definitively abolished on April 10, 1933. At the outbreak of the Second World War, the exchange rate to the U. S. dollar was fixed at C$1.10 = US$1.00. This was changed to parity in 1946. In 1949, sterling was devalued and Canada followed, returning to a peg of C$1.10 = US$1.00. However, Canada allowed its dollar to float in 1950, whereupon the currency rose to a slight premium over the U. S. dollar for the next decade. But the Canadian dollar fell after 1960 before it was again pegged in 1962 at C$1.00 = US$0.925. This was sometimes pejoratively referred to as the "Diefenbuck" or the "Diefendollar", after the Prime Minister, John Diefenbaker; this peg lasted until 1970. Canadian English, like American English, used the slang term "buck" for a former paper dollar; the Canadian origin of this term derives from a coin struck by the Hudson's Bay Company during the 17th century with a value equal to the pelt of a male beaver – a "buck".
Because of the appearance of the common loon on the back of the $1 coin that replaced the dollar bill in 1987, the word "loonie" was adopted in Canadian parla
CAD$ 14.4 billion (2018)
