OTTAWA - Money is expensive. Or, more to the point, 'currency' is expensive. Printing it, minting it, securing it, maintaining it, replacing it. It is easy to overlook the massive costs associated with the physical aspects our monetary system.

I am certainly not in favour of abolishing our monetary system at all, or even moving towards a gold standard. I am simply staggered at the costs that will be incurred as Canada moves to replace its cotton-paper bills with more state-of-the-art polymer blends.

Canada's $50 and $100 bills will be the first to arrive in 2012, but the $5, $10, and $20 polymer bills will follow shortly thereafter in 2013. The total bill for this overhaul? $100-million.

$100-million buys a lot of new twenties and fifties - but, of course, these new costs will be used for a great deal more than printing the new bills. The largest expense will almost certainly be the necessary upgrades to Canada's money-handling machinery. There are an estimated 500,000 money-handling machines in use in Canada that will soon be rendered obsolete. Despite maintaining the same general dimensions, the new bills are thinner than their outgoing counterparts, with a decidedly smoother texture. Furthermore, there are a whole raft of new security features 'baked' into the new bills which will require a new breed of counterfeit bill detection technology.

While many Canadians may think this is a problem that will only inconvenience bank tellers and other financial sector industries, this is actually a problem that could impact us all. ATM machines alone number close to 75,000 in Canada - each will need to be upgraded to tabulate, handle, and dispense the new bills.

So, with such an exorbitant price tag is it worth it for Canada to transition to polymer bills? The short answer is, yes. As the title of this article suggests, money is expensive. Staying with cotton-based bills would have also carried a lofty price - it would likely have been even more expensive than a switch to polymer bills over just a few short years.

You see, cotton-based bills have struggled to stay ahead of the counterfeiting curve. It would have costed Canada approximately $200-million to enhance our bills' security measures using existing cotton-based fibres. This would not have been money well spent - as the switch to polymer bills would still need to be made within a few years.

As an analogue, one may look to the recent proliferation of CD and DVD burning hardware that has saturated the tech market. Machinery to counterfeit bills has seen a similar proliferation, with ease of access becoming of central concern. The new polymer bills will force send counterfeiters back to the drawing board for at least a few years.

Furthermore, there are some interesting new features inherent to the new bills. Visually impaired Canadians will be able to slide the new bills through a 'bill reader' to quickly determine the value of a given bill. Also, the new bills will last more than seven years - more than twice as long as their outgoing cotton-based counterparts.

This transition will be an expensive one, but it is also a necessary one. If this transition is accomplished with the proper diligence and foresight it is likely that subsequent upgrades can be accomplished with minimal expense in the coming years. Polymer bills will be a part of our monetary system for the foreseeable future - the sooner we can make this transition and install new money-handling equipment, the better off Canada will be.