The buck does stop here
Bank of Canada really misses the boat with its new bills
Igot a new $5 bill in my change at a restaurant the other day. Happy as I was to get some money back, the new fiver didn’t make my heart beat fast.
The bill shows the Canadarm floating in space above the Earth — a technological marvel for sure, but kind of blah if you think of Canadian currency as a sort of portable billboard for the country’s coolness quotient.
The new $10 bill, which features a train, is also a dud.
In designing the new bills, the Bank of Canada missed a chance to show us how we live now. The new $5 should depict one of those smug, bendy ladies doing yoga, not a space gadget.
Those ashrams or dojos or namastes — whatever they call those yoga studios — are on every corner, like gyms in the 1980s.
When the time comes for a new $50 bill, there’s only one choice — Rob Ford, the man who changed Toronto the Good into Toronto, Good for a Laugh.
Bikram Yoga — that’s the one where you do the stretches with the heat turned way up — is hugely popular. At the end of a session, you’re meant to feel like a poached salmon — a spiritual poached salmon with blood fizzing in every corpuscle. The woman who thought up Bikram Yoga in Britain has invented a new system called Fierce Grace. It’s like she took the IKEA instructions for the Hossenfeffer bookcase, say, and adapted it to inflict human pain. Instead of “Insert Rod A into Flugplatz R,” it’s “Place left heel under right ear. Now shake your asante.”
Bikram is supposed to rid the body of toxins. Like most guys, I’m content to let my liver do that.
The liver has been around even longer than yoga, and works amazingly well, toxins wise.
Somewhere in Canada, the following phone conversation will take place one day, if it hasn’t already:
Typical guy: “Hey, Pops, what’s up?”
Father: “It’s your Aunt Betty. She has passed on.”
Guy: “Oh, no. Was it a heart attack or a stroke? Don’t tell me it was cancer.”
Father: “She was found dead without a mark on her body, but her brand-new Lululemon outfit was torn and frayed at the seams. She died trying to contort herself into the Downward Dog pose. The guru or commandant or whatever they call the head torturer at those places says her body spasmed when she died so that her back was arched perfectly for the pose — something she never managed while alive.”
The new $10 bill is all wrong, too. It shows a train, but it’s the wrong train. Instead of a generic locomotive, the bank should have used the Diefenbaker funeral train rolling across the Prairies toward Saskatoon in August 1979.
Toronto Star photographer Bob Olsen captured a moving moment in his historic photo, which features a farm family’s farewell to Dief as the train passes — the men waving ball caps in respect, a mother holding a toddler with three other kids nearby.
The New York Times ran Olsen’s photo across three columns on a prominent page. For the staid Times, that was equivalent to a tabloid splashing the photo on page 1.
In hockey terms, John Diefenbaker was a prime minister who played with his elbows up.
Dief was never averse to giving opponents a shot in the jowls. Like Gordie Howe, he wasn’t a damn sneak about it. That’s worth celebrating on our currency.
And I’d like to see Joe Clark on the new $10 bill, instead of Sir John A. — not that Macdonald wasn’t a great prime minister. He was. But Clark is a tragic figure in Canadian politics — the man who became PM too soon. He was sworn in just before he turned 40, and his minority government had the shelf life of a tub of yogurt. Now Clark is our elder statesman and the country’s leading cheerleader. His new book is a plea for an optimistic style of politics, a change from the cynicism that pervades Parliament now.
There should be an app on the high-tech $10 bill, too. A recording of Clark’s famous Heh-hehheh chuckle would be perfect. It was mocked by comics at the time. Now it’s just endearing, part of his charm.
When the time comes for a new $50 bill, there’s only one choice — Rob Ford, the man who changed Toronto the Good into Toronto, Good for a Laugh. A Ford $50 bill would show the world that Canadians love a good laugh as much as we believe in redemption.