Loonie with a Robert-Ralph Carmichael design of a common loon floating in water. The coin was immediately nicknamed the "loonie" across English Canada, and became known as a "huard", French for "loon", in Quebec. The loonie entered circulation on June 30, 1987, as 40 million coins were introduced into major cities across the country. Over 800 million loonies had been struck by the coin's 20th anniversary. Two years after the loonie's introduction, the Bank of Canada ceased production of the dollar banknote. The final dollar bills were printed on June 30, 1989. Initial support for the coin was mixed, but withdrawing
Canadian dollar the Canadian dollar coin from the dollar bill. When the two-dollar coin was introduced in 1996, the derivative word "toonie" ("two loonies") became the common word for it in Canadian English slang. In French, the currency is also called ; Canadian French slang terms include or (the original word used in 18th-century French to translate "dollar") and (equivalent to "loonie", since is French for "loon," the bird appearing on the coin). The French pronunciation of (pronounced similarly to English as or , not like the word for hundred, or ) is generally used for the subdivision; is another, informal, term