A list of banknotable Atlantic Canadians

The nominations for an iconic Canadian to grace the new Canadian $5 bill closed March 11. The list, last updated on March 6, makes for inspiring reading.

Even if the criteria were pretty simple: the nominee had to be a real person — no fictional Evangelines or dreamed-up Captain Canucks. They had to be dead for at least 25 years, ruling out modern day icons like Tommy Chong and The Rock.

They had to be Canadian by birth or naturalization and they must also have “demonstrated outstanding leadership, achievement, or distinction in any field, benefiting the people of Canada, or in the service of Canada.”

Some of the usual suspects are there: Billy Bishop, Tommy Davis, Sandford Fleming, Terry Fox, Glenn Gould, Nellie McClung, old prime ministers and hockey players, a smattering of Canadians who made it big in Hollywood and most of the Group of Seven.

But some of them aren’t necessarily household names — John Stanley Plaskett the astronomer; Francis Pegahmagabow, the deadliest sniper in the First World War, who later returned to become a hero fighting for Indigenous rights in his Ojibwa First Nation — or their presence underscores that history isn’t all soaring acts of derring-do (Archibald Belaney, the English-born conservationist, writer and fraud, better known as Grey Owl.)

Running through the names that hail from Down East, or at least have some kind of connection to the Atlantic Provinces, gives a sense of how lively and intensely interesting our story is, even if, in our Maritime way, we decline to brag about it.

So the list contains people whose wartime courage will live on: Mona Parsons, the Middleton-born actress and hero of the Dutch Resistance in the Second World War; William Hall, the first black person, first Nova Scotian and third Canadian to receive the Victoria Cross; Joseph Broussard, also known as Beausoleil, who led the Acadian militia and the Mi’Kmaq in armed resistance against the English in the late 17th century.

Someone suggested Vince Coleman, the hero of the Halifax Explosion, and Mt. Hanley’s own Joshua Slocum, who, leaving from Yarmouth, in his rebuilt oyster sloop, Spray, completed the first solo circumvention of the globe, making him arguably the world’s greatest mariner, before or since.

But also nominated are

Anna Mae Pictou Aquash, the Mi’kmaq activist from the Shubenacadie area who was murdered for her convictions on a desolate road in South

Dakota, and J.B. McLachlan, who fought for coal miner’s rights during the darkest days of Cape Breton’s labour wars.

I like all of those names. Just as I like the influencers who have been brought forward, well-known politicians who bestrode their provinces for long periods of time like Joe Howe and Joey Smallwood, and names I’ve frankly never heard of like Adams George Archibald, a Truro-born Father of Confederation.

It is good to see thinkers like George Grant, the political and religious philosopher who taught for long periods of time at Dalhousie University, and Northrup Frye, the literary theorist who lived as a youth in Moncton — as well as social reformers like Moses Coady, the founder of the Antigonish Movement, and Edith Archibald, the St. John’s-born suffragist.

Someone had the good taste and sense to nominate Portia White, the operatic contralto; Maud Lewis, the painter, and Don Messer, the fiddler.

At least two men of action made the list: Sam Langford of Weymouth and George Dixon, a pair of prize-fighters for the ages, who made their mark far from their Nova Scotia home.

There are also a lot of writers: Lucy Maud Montgomery the creator of Anne of Green Gables, Thomas Chandler Haliburton, the Windsor judge who brought the Yankee peddler Sam Slick into this world, Gene MacLellan who wrote Snowbird and other hit songs, and even a poet, Alden Nowlan, who never moved far from New Brunswick.

Some people’s accomplishments are just hard to categorize. Samuel Champlain, you may recall, was the Father of New France. Angus Walters captained the famed schooner Bluenose during her prime racing years.

J.A.D. McCurdy became the first person to successfully fly an airplane anywhere in the British Empire when he lifted the Silver Dart, which he helped design and build, off the ice and into the air near his birthplace of Baddeck.

I don’t have enough room to tell you about Alexander Graham Bell’s accomplishments other than he managed to keep himself busy, and never found anywhere he loved as much as Cape Breton’s Bras d’Or Lake.

I might have added a couple more names to the list — Dan R. MacDonald, the Celtic composer, or perhaps the two faces of Willard Boyle and Arthur McDonald, our two Nobel prize winners — but who, really, can argue with any of them.

Chances of the choice being one of ours is surely slim now that Viola Desmond graces the $10 bill. But when you see those names, you puff your chest out a little. You feel proud to say, no matter how tenuous the connection, that these, these are my people.