Toronto City Council is still admirably focused on carving out savings and weeding out inefficiencies where they can. Councillor Howard Moscoe, for example, sees an opportunity in enforcing the superiority of the mighty loonie:

“There’s a glut of U.S. coins being dumped in the economy,” Moscoe (Ward 15, Eglinton-Lawrence) said yesterday.

“The city’s going to lose millions if it continues to accept them,” he added.

Wow, milions? Really?

Well, let’s see.

Let’s assume 20,000,000 million US nickels are inserted into Toronto meters in the brief time the C$ stays above the US$.

That’s US$1,000,000, worth at this morning’s exchange rate about C$968,800 (C$1.0322/US$1). So on what should be $1,000,000, the city incurs a loss of C$31,200. To incur a loss of even C$1 million, there would need to be $32 million in revenue from US nickels, or 641,025,641 US nickels inserted into Toronto parking meters. To get to millions of dollars in losses, you multiply that.

The Toronto Parking Authority‘s revenue for all of 2006? $97.2 million.

I’m not worried.