Last month, the Bank of Canada unveiled the design for the new $20 bill. It will be the first banknote that features our current head of state — the King of Canada, Charles III.
And I hate everything about it.
First off, I feel bad for Charles. The designers didn’t exactly pick a flattering portrait of the man, placing considerable emphasis on his big ears. As someone who also lives with comically large ears, I feel slightly offended on his behalf.
And while I’m no lover of the Canadian monarchy, I reluctantly accept that the King of Canada probably belongs on our currency.12
My first major gripe with this new release is the fact that it’s vertical.
There’s something about vertical bills that makes my skin crawl. Perhaps I’m just rebelling against our modern disdain for all things flat and outwardly-expanding, in favour of the slim-and-tall. Thanks to the smartphone, photos and videos have moved away from being predominantly horizontal (beautiful, correct, the way nature intended), and are now overwhelmingly vertical (off-putting, fiendish, maybe even immoral).
Mohammed Bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince, tried to resist this modern obsession by proposing a 170-km “horizontal skyscraper” called the Line. But such a beautiful dream could never become a reality in this age dominated by up-and-down. The project looks like it will never materialize.3
And so it is with banknotes.
Historically, the majority of countries have printed bills that (properly) present their images and text from left-to-right4. After all, the wallet has always been a horizontal medium. But over the last two decades, a class of degenerate currency designers have pushed some states to introduce upright bills. Truly debauched countries like Switzerland have fully adopted the practice.
But in typical Canadian fashion, we have refused to take a side. In 2018, we introduced our first vertical bill, the $10, featuring Nova Scotia civil rights activist Viola Desmond. And now, eight years later, this new $20 bill will join this ignominious club.
But despite my partisanship in this War of Dimensions, this is far from my biggest problem with our money. In fact, I don't really care all that much about it. I'm mostly using it as an excuse to write about my true grievance — we put the most boring possible people on our money.
The time has come for us to do a complete overhaul.
Up until the 1960s, the only face that was featured on our banknotes was the reigning queen or the king of Canada.5
But in 1969, Edgar Benson, Pierre Trudeau’s first finance minister, decided to make a change. Canada was increasingly embracing its identity as a nation independent of the British Empire, and Benson felt that our symbols should reflect that.
“I believe that in Canada we don’t pay enough attention to our prime ministers who have done a great deal for our country,” he said at the time. “So we’re going to simply put their portraits on other bills in our country.”
He chose four Canadian PMs to be featured on our banknotes — John A. Macdonald, Wilfrid Laurier, Robert Borden and William Lyon Mackenzie King. At the time, placing these men on our money was a bold move, representing a break from the British imperial tradition.
And I respect what he did. What I don’t respect is what happened in the decades after — nothing.6
Instead, we’ve largely kept the same faces on our money ever since.
Now I sincerely want to ask — what percentage of Canadians have a positive view of Prime Minister Robert Bordon. Better yet, what percentage of Canadians have a view, any view, of Robert Borden? Even historians consider him to be a middling prime minister, giving him an average ranking of eighth overall.7
Like it or not, the image of the monarch on our money inspires a feeling in some people, whether positive or negative. I doubt that seeing Borden’s face makes even the most patriotic Canadian feel anything at all.
Even when it comes to a truly significant prime minister like William Lyon Mackenzie King — a man who occupied the post longer than any other — your average Canadian is as likely to think of Japanese internment or the MS. St. Louis or the conscription crisis as they are one of his more positive achievements.8
Some will surely argue that this has more to do with the lacklustre nature of our historical education or because the much-dreaded “wokeness” has infected the Canadian mind.
But I want to be very clear here. I’m not arguing that we should remove Laurier from the $5 bill because of his racist immigration policies or kick Borden off the $100 bill because he campaigned under the slogan “A White Canada.” (Though I am sympathetic to those arguments).
I simply think we’re missing out on an important opportunity. Our banknotes constitute some of most important symbolic real estate available to us as a country. And unlike most of our peers, we have consistently chosen the most boring options imaginable.
Because almost no one else does it this way!
Most major countries do not simply have a handful of lacklustre political leaders on their currency. They choose to honour a panoply of achievement that actually connects the people to the nation.
Let’s take the United Kingdom as a representative example. Since Robert Walpole became the first prime minister in 1721, Britain9 has had 59 different PMs. Many of them have been immense, historically-significant figures: Benjamin Disraeli, William Gladstone, David Lloyd George, Winston Churchill, Clement Attlee. Walpole himself, as the first and longest-serving prime minister, might merit recognition on money.
But the British pound has only ever featured two PMs — the Duke of Wellington and Churchill.10
Instead, they’ve decided to honour a wider array of extraordinary British people: Jane Austen, J.M.W Turner, Alan Turing and yes, Winston Churchill and King Charles. So we have a writer, a painter, a mathematician, the greatest drinker in modern British history and the King.
To my mind, that is a collection of people that speak to what it means to be a modern day Brit.
Other countries have done much the same.
Before the adoption of the Euro, France honoured Claude Debussy, Marie and Pierre Curie, Eugène Delacroix, Gustave Eiffel, Paul Cézanne, and many others on the Franc.
Italy chose Raphael and Caravaggio, the master painters; Marconi, the inventor of the radio; Volta, the inventor of the battery; and the opera composer Bellini.
Even Germany, which has the most fraught relationship with nationalism of any country around, chose figures that said something about who they are. The Deutsche Mark featured individuals like the mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss (representing a long, proud tradition of scientific and philosophical inquiry) and the Brothers Grimm (representing a similarly proud tradition of terrifying little children).
Australia and New Zealand, which are our closest analogues, similarly use their cash to feature architects and singers and engineers and authors, alongside the occasional politician.
Who do you think feels more pride?
The average Kiwi who sees Ernest Rutherford, the father of nuclear physics, and Edmund Hilary, one of the two first climbers to summit Mount Everest, on their money? Or the Canadian, forced to stare at Laurier and King’s faces for half-a-century?
And because they can draw upon a much wider pool, Australia and New Zealand have been able to showcase important Indigenous figures from their history11.
Which brings me to the one exception to the totalizing rule of Prime Ministers on Canadian money — civil rights activist Viola Desmond, who was brought onto the $10 bill in 2018, controversially replacing John A. Macdonald. Desmond is exactly the kind of person I think we should be featuring on our money. She’s a significant figure in Canadian history, who fought against racial discrimination outside of electoral politics.
But because she’s the exception to the rule, the one person who breaks from our musty monetary traditionalism, her presence on our money feels less like a celebration of an exceptional Canadian and more like tokenism. It’s historical pandering — throwing a bone to the oppressed peoples of this country, so that we’ll finally quit our whining. In some ways, it’s the worst of all the possible options. The Canadian government is demonstrating that the Big Four of Macdonald, Laurier, King and Borden are not sacrosanct, but they don’t have the courage to fully embrace a broader and deeper vision of Canadian history.
The Bank of Canada has announced that the next five-dollar bill will feature Terry Fox, as close to a unifying figure as we have in Anglo-Canada. And that’s an excellent choice12. Canada should take that opportunity to finally change over entirely, let the prime ministers rest, and give some other Canadians a chance at monetary glory.
So who to choose? Well, first off, by breaking away from the way that we’ve always done things, we don’t have to choose just one set of people for all time. Different figures can be chosen in different decades, making it easier to dig deep into our proud history of art, culture, science, activism, military service and yes, even politics. Each time we make a shift, it will be an invitation for Canadians to explore our past and debate its significance amongst ourselves.
Now I certainly have my preferences, which lean towards the artists. Give me Emily Carr for her iconic paintings and Oscar Peterson, who by my estimation is the greatest musician this country has ever produced. If they were on the $50 and $100 bills, maybe more Canadians would seek out Carr’s Church in Yuquot Village or Peterson’s marvellous Hymn to Freedom. How about Robert Service, the Bard of the Yukon? What Canadian English-speaking child hasn’t been moved and beguiled by The Cremation of Sam McGee?
Labour heroes like Daniel John O’Donoghue, whose organizing contributed to the legalization of unions in Canada, and Helen Armstrong, who helped lead the Winnipeg General Strike, would make for good candidates. So would Indigenous leaders like Thayendanegea (also known as Joseph Brant), Gabriel Dumont and Francis Pegahmagabow.
For scientists and inventors, we have a bevy of riches. Frederick Banting and Charles Best for their work discovering insulin, and thereby saving millions upon millions of lives. Alexander Graham Bell for his invention of the telephone. Sanford Fleming, the chief engineer of the CPR, which bound Canada together.13
And here, I want to make an important point — being featured on our money isn’t the same as being canonized. These shouldn’t have to be saintly figures completely above controversy. After all, Bell had a genocidal attitude towards Deaf people. Banting was an anti-Semite. Fleming’s engineering marvels contributed to the deaths of Chinese workers and Indigenous peoples on the plains.
But we can honour them for what they did right, and what it says about what we want Canada to be, while still being honest about the who these people were and the negative sides of their legacies.
Don’t like my suggestions? Well, I have even more! For the people who continue to insist that we must worship at the altar of politics, they could push for a Fathers of Confederation series. Macdonald could make a return, joined by men like George-Étienne Cartier, George Brown, Louis Riel, Amor De Cosmos and George Coles. Hell, why not throw Joey Smallwood, the man who brought Newfoundland and Labrador into Canada, in for good measure?
For another politico-centric series, you could shift the focus to the provinces, and feature portraits of some of the most influential and important premiers — men like Saskatchewan’s Tommy Douglas, Quebec’s Jean Lesage, Ontario’s Oliver Mowat, Manitoba’s John Norquay, BC’s WAC Bennett and Alberta’s Peter Lougheed (or William Aberhart for the sickos).
And again, I want to emphasize that I don’t like many of, if not most, of these people. As a born-and-bred British Columbian, I've never been able to shake the feeling that Wacky Bennett is one of history's greatest monsters. But how many people east of the Rockies have even heard of Bennett before? That, I think, is the point. Our money is one of the few places where we could all be invited to have a true national conversation about our history and what it means.
And it’s for this reason that I think we also have to avoid the very Canadian impulse of eliding the conversation entirely and only feature landscapes and buildings, as some countries like Russia and Brazil do. No, we must be forced to choose real historical people, and thereby have the real conversations and debates that will invariably arise from the choosing.
The options are endless. The long-list that I put together for myself has almost 50 people. I’m sure you have your choices that you would want to see. And I frankly find it hard to believe that when presented with such a beautiful and open world of choices, most Canadians would fight to retain Robert Borden on our cash.
We’ll claw and scratch at each other over who should be selected and who’s left out. But after all, that’s what serious countries do. And if that’s what we want to be, this would be a start.
If you want him off our money, the best move is to organize a republican referendum, like Australia held in 1999. If you can convince Céline Dion to be the first president of Canada, it might actually work.
The reverse side of the new bill, which, like the old bill, features an image of the Vimy Ridge memorial in Northern France, is both appropriate and well-designed.
This is, of course, a joke. The Line was perhaps the most narcissistic and hubristic architectural idea since Hitler’s proposed “Volkshalle,” and has already caused the deaths of thousands of workers. And perhaps most tragic of all, the downgrading of the project has meant less revenue for Canadian construction giant AtkinsRéalis, formerly known as SNC-Lavalin).
Or right-to-left, in the case of Arabic, Hebrew, Farsi and other such languages.
With the exception of $500 and $1000 bills that were not widely circulated.
With some exceptions, which will be addressed later in the article.
Historians put Borden behind not only John A. Macdonald, Wilfrid Laurier and William Lyon Mackenzie King, but also Pierre Trudeau, Lester Pearson, Louis St. Laurent and Jean Chrétien.
Some would argue that C.D. Howe, King’s “minister of everything,” deserves the bulk of the credit for King’s successes.
Of course, Great Britain and the United Kingdom are not the same, but let that slide for now.
The first one defeated Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo, and the second helped defeat Hitler. (And don’t take this as an endorsement of Churchill, that’s another, much longer article entirely).
David Unapion, a Ngarrindjeri writer and inventor, has been featured on the $50 AUD note since 1995. In New Zealand, the very first paper notes issued in 1934 included an image of Tāwhiao, the second Māori king. Today, the $50 bill features Āpirana Ngata, a Māori politician and statesman.
I also think it’s high-time that Vancouver International Airport is finally renamed Terry Fox International, but that’s another column entirely.
You’ll notice that I’ve included very few French-Canadian figures in these lists and its because I’m largely ignorant when it comes to Franco culture in this country. But if we had a national debate around who should be on our money, I’d probably learn quite a bit about important Québécois and Acadian cultural icons in the process.
Félix Leclerc.
Arshy, your passionate essay reminds me of when I taught teenage newcomers about Canadian money. And every year, fewer and fewer kids, from here and away, actually used bills or coins. Now that Leonard Nimoy is dead, that Spock joke on the fiver doesn't land past Gen X. When Black Lives Mattered, every school seemed to have a Viola mural, so maybe Gen Z will rember who's that lady on the tanner. Just curious if anyone under 40 gets excited by the newest faces on Canadian stamps? Thanks for this joyful spin to our Monday.