Banknote design fraught with peril

Maybe I am the only one. My first reaction to the design of the Bank of Canada’s new commemorative $ 10 bill was: “Four people? Really?” I almost never carry or handle cash anymore, so maybe I should learn to let go of fussiness about banknotes. The four heads represented on the bill fit comfortably, having been shrunken a little for the purpose.

But is the Bank of Canada opening a door it may not be able to close? When the 200th anniversary of Confederation comes around, will they need to depict six heads on our holographic blockchain scrip? Eight heads? Will the bills begin to resemble a page from a high school yearbook?

The anniversary tenner will be a widely distributed example, most instructive to children, of the typical result of decision- making by committee. You can actually read the process on the bill from left to right. First voice: “It’s Canada’s anniversary: Sir John A. Macdonald may not be fashionable right now, but he obviously has to be back on the 10 for this occasion.”

Second voice: “You know what we haven’t ever done, though, is represent his great French- Canadian colleague Cartier on a note. It’s not really fair, is it? Cartier was a co-founder of our state, practically a collateral head of the original Canadian government. Macdonald should not really be on any banknote WITHOUT Cartier.”

Third voice: “So, what, it’s just two white dudes now?” Ominous silence.

This is a purely artistic problem: Cartier and Agnes Macphail and James Gladstone are all extraordinary people worth celebrating, but if that is the case then perhaps they merit their own banknote rather than a share of a very cluttered one.

In the past I have proposed a very high standard for banknote appearances: I have argued that money represents us to the world, and that we should try to honour Canadians of permanent and global significance on bills, rather than local heroes. The Bank’s recent announcement that it will create a $ 10 note for ordinary use with the image of Nova Scotia businesswoman and civil rights fighter Viola Desmond demonstrates the educational argument against the world-significance standard, in favour of local figures — particularly ones who stood up for universal principles of justice, as Desmond did, and who do not yet have the wide recognition they might have deserved.

We may not care whether anybody in Japan or New Zealand has heard of Viola Desmond, but because she is on a 10-dollar bill, our kids will hear about her. Desmond was an ordinary citizen rather than a politician, someone who worked for equality in the community rather than exclusively in a legislature. That is, in my view, a big plus. (It is even a point in favour of Macphail, who was certainly a politician but whose most enduring legacy may be the Elizabeth Fry Society of Canada, and a strong point for Sen. Gladstone, a leader and cultural arbiter who was never in electoral politics at all.)

The choice of Viola Desmond came at the end of a formal search for historic women to put on a banknote, and I am still baffled by the absence of one name from the shortlist: that of the novelist L. M. Montgomery. If you think about the global noteworthiness standard, there are not many Canadians of any race or gender who can meet it. In its highest form it would exclude, for example, Wayne Gretzky, who must be one of the two or three most famous Canadians: there are too many places on Earth that know or care noth- ing of ice hockey.

They play Bach on keyboard instruments everywhere, so you could put Glenn Gould on a banknote under this rule. I start running out of names pretty damn fast after that, which may suggest a truth about our country that we do not like to confront. But Lucy Maud Montgomery is surely near the top of any such list.

Think what an extraordinary thing it is that we are still arguing about the merits of new adaptations of ( and posters for) Anne of Green Gables. Those books are literature of a type that almost revels in its ephemerality. They were meant to be affordable components of a homogeneous literary diet for the young. Montgomery could never have imagined that she would end up as the most enduring, best- travelled Canadian fiction author of all.

But how many cycles of fashion has Anne outlived; how many avant- garde authors and poets of her time has she seen off into oblivion? There is something about her that has unfailingly charmed readers of 1960 and 1990 and 2017. Nothing about this phenomenon is insincere or contrived, and it seems to transcend the Englishspeaking world with ease. Progressives and feminists are not reluctant to give the Anne books to their children. There has been no attack that I know of on Montgomery’s political bona fides. Her intellectual ambitions were small, and confined to an out-of-the-way place, yet her imagination conquered a world.

All of which does not even take into account the merely commercial argument for a banknote with Anne of Green Gables and/or her creator on it: the Japanese would hoard it like treasure. Then again, maybe that is what the Bank of Canada is afraid of — unpredictable monetary effects from an important currency denomination being too popular as a collectible. But I cannot see any other reason for them to keep missing this layup. Maybe they are prudently keeping Anne in reserve for the advent of the five- dollar coin, in order that the annie might join the loonie and the toonie?

I HAVE ARGUED THAT MONEY REPRESENTS US TO THE WORLD.