The coins will feature a picture of Pope John Paul II celebrating Mass during his inaugural visit to Canada in 1984. “ Pope John Paul II was not only the first base Roman Catholic pope in history to visit Canada, but a church drawing card whose pontificate featured many firsts around the world, ” said Ian E. Bennett, the CEO of the Royal Canadian Mint, in a statement .
Big profits
While the mint is marketing these coins as “ beautiful additions for any collector or stunning gifts for history buffs, ” there ‘s besides no question that they are besides probable to help generate bad profits for the Crown pot. The batch now makes big money by making money — specially the many commemorative gold and silver coins that are sold to collectors. The markups on these coins can be high. For the papal amber coin, for example, the quarter snow leopard of amber in the coin is worth about $ 357 Cdn. But the mint is priced about $ 300 higher.
Among the amber coins on offer this year is a one-kilogram solid gold coin that marks the chinese zodiac ‘s year of the horse. It can be yours for $ 69,000, even though it contains only $ 46,000 worth of gold at today ‘s prices. The batch besides makes the democratic gold and silver maple flick coins. In 2012, the mint sold 883,048 maple flick amber coins, which contain one snow leopard of pure gold. It besides sold more than 18 million of the silver coins, which contain one snow leopard of silver. The batch besides designs and manufactures coins for many early countries.
Read more: Post-Crumpocalyptic
All that has resulted in a hearty bottom cable for the mint. In 2012, it reported a pretax profit of $ 40.7 million on sales of $ 2.58 billion. The mint is n’t entirely concerned with making special commemorative coins. It even makes the air pocket change Canadians habit every day, which means minting more than a billion nickels, dimes, quarters, loonies and toonies each year .
