Yes, that $10 bill is different
New bill featuring female civil rights advocate launched
WINNIPEG — Canada’s new $10 bill officially went into circulation Monday, breaking new ground in more ways than one.
The banknote is the first vertically oriented bill in Canada and the first regularly circulating banknote to feature a Canadian woman, civil rights advocate Viola Desmond, on the front.
“The Queen is in good company,” Desmond’s 91-year-old sister, Wanda Robson, said with a smile at the bill’s official launch Monday at the Canadian Museum For Human Rights.
Desmond was arrested after refusing to leave a whites-only section of a theatre in New Glasgow, N.S., in 1946.
It was 63 years later — after Desmond’s death — that the Nova Scotia government issued an apology and pardon.
“It is one thing to accomplish great things when the wind is at your back, but another altogether when society is set up to sit you down,” John Young, chief executive officer of the Canadian Museum For Human Rights, said at the launch ceremony at the museum.
The museum itself is featured on the back of the bill, and the banknote has other human rights elements — an excerpt from the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and an eagle feather that the Bank of Canada says is in recognition of the rights of Indigenous people.
Desmond was selected to be on the bill after an open call for nominations and a public opinion survey on the Bank of Canada website.
Robson said her sister would be proud to see the new currency.