The Bank of Canada today unveiled a new $10 banknote, featuring Viola Desmond.
I haven’t seen one of these notes in person yet, but if the pictures in the news stories are any indication, they are gorgeous and may be the best Canadian banknote design since the $20 with the Haida art.
Huh, I thought that all Canadian currency featured the Queen (or whomever the current monarch is).
And the portrait orientation is really messing with my head. Logically, there’s no reason that a banknote must be oriented in landscape, but I’ve seen so many that way that any other way just looks wrong.
The Queen is on the $20 banknote only (and all the coins). Before this, the others had former Prime Ministers (and four assorted other people on the Canada 150 commemorative $10 issued last year).
Here’s the official Bank of Canada site.
This.
Vertical banknotes aren’t unprecedented. (Some of those images are “concept drawings”, but many are real notes, like these.)
American banknotes are reeeeeally crappy.
Any $10 notes, in sufficient quantity, are beautiful.
Ehh … I like the current tens better.
It does look rather more like a film poster than legal tender.
I feel like I should make a Canada joke here, but I got nothin’.
Makes me think of jackasses who film video while holding their phones upright. There’s nothing objectively wrong with the note, but that filming style is awful.
I wish her face didn’t have that soft filter. The Wikipedia is the same image but doesn’t have it as bad.
I know this is a total nitpick, but she was also on the one, two, and thousand dollar bills before they were withdrawn, which are all still legal currency. You are correct for bills being currently produced though.
All coins, anyway. She hasn’t been on all bills in my lifetime, if ever.
I’m not a fan of the vertical orientation NOW, but I’ll get used to it soon enough.
She’s better looking than Wilf Laurier.
I guess I’m older than you, Rick. 
I remember the first series of bills that she was on, from the mid-50s to the early 70s. She was on all those bills, from $1 to $1000 (not that I ever saw anything more than a $20, and very rarely, a $2 (growing up in Saskatchewan)).
The bills with Laurier ($5), John A ($10), King ($50) and Borden came out in the early 70s. She was still on the $1, $2, $20 and $1,000.
Bank of Canada has stopped printing all but the $20, so that’s the only one that still has HM.
That was only the case for the series designed during coronation fever in the 50s. All the others, before and after, had others on some (although George VI was on all but the $100 and $1000, which I imagine lots of people never saw).
The orientation made me think ‘bus transfer’ on first glance.
Not the best impression to have, too Rosa Parks-y.
As others noted, the Queen is only on the $20 (AFAIK), the others have prime ministers on the front.
Wow, I agree with you about the portrait orientation. There’s a damn good reason for a landscape orientation: that’s how the bills sit in your wallet, that’s how you take them out, and that’s how you count them or lay them down. I thought that the portrait-looking stuff in the first link was just cropped portions of the bill, but nope, that’s what it looks like. I do not approve, but I wasn’t consulted!
Other than that, it’s otherwise pretty nice. Most new Canadian banknotes look pretty cool because they’re plastic with colorful print and transparent sections that contain holograms.
You have Senator Palpatine on your money, that’s pretty cool.
Interesting, there’s an instantly recognizable map of downtown Halifax in the background (to the left of her portrait), but her hair is obscuring her grave site (missed opportunity at symbolism to have it marked on her bill).
An interesting historical note, Nova Scotia cemeteries (like most sectors in life) were often segregated by race so Black Nova Scotians had to be buried in a ‘coloured section’ or even outside of the cemetery boundaries (where graves fell prey to disrepair and land development). Prominent members of society (like Viola Desmond) were allowed to break this colour barrier though, so you can find her grave in a central-ish (now marked as historically significant) section of the Camp Hill Cemetery. However the largest, most central, prominent grave stone there is…
…twice mayor Alexander Keith. Located right next to Halifax Public Gardens, on the main path, and the largest monument there. Always a beer bottle left behind, can’t miss it.
On the last paper $10, he looked a bit like Gene Wilder. On the version before that, sort of a Bill Mahr vibe.
