Valuing the ‘ Vimy’ as a reflection of sacrifices and nation- building
Campaign aims to rebrand $ 20 bill in honour of First World War battle, writes Joe O’Connor.
The French could not take Vimy Ridge. They fought and bled and died by the tens of thousands trying in 1915, but the German army held the high ground and the German army wasn’t budging. And so along came the British but, again, the Germans wouldn’t crack, and they pushed the Brits back until the Brits gave up and it fell to the Canadians, a bunch of ex- colonials from across the Atlantic — from farms and fishing villages and ranches and cities and places in between — to win the unwinnable in April, 1917.
And that is what they did, fighting under a Canadian commander, General Sir Arthur Currie, a farm boy from rural Ontario known as old “Guts and Gaiters,” and using novel military tactics, such as creeping artillery barrages and attacking in small groups, rather than simply charging the German guns and hoping for the best.
Canada’s victory at Vimy has been memorialized and mythologized in our history textbooks and Remembrance Day ceremonies as the four bloody days in France — April 9- 12, 1917 — that made a nation out of us rubes from across the Atlantic. We did not need England to stand on our own. In fact, she needed us.
Nearly 4,000 Canadians were killed in the battle. Now, 98 years after a hard victory was won, the ghosts of Vimy are stirring, preparing for an assault that will require marketing savvy — and not military might — to capture the objective: the $ 20 bill and the imagination of the Canadian public.
Some background: In November 2012, the Bank of Canada began circulating a new $ 20 banknote with the Queen on one side and the Canadian war memorial at Vimy Ridge on the other. One year later, The Vimy Foundation, an organization dedicated to preserving and promoting “Canada’s First World War legacy as symbolized with the victory at Vimy Ridge in April 1917,” had a brilliant idea, one this writer wholeheartedly supports. Why not refer to the new $ 20 bill as the “Vimy?”
The second part of the idea involved launching a fundraising campaign for a new education centre at the Vimy memorial in France and enlisting the likes of Rick Mercer, Don Cherry, Paul Gross, and an alphabet soup of government ministers as spokespersons, and using the slogan: “Give a Vimy for Vimy.”
Money would come rolling in, surely, while the loonie and toonie would be joined in the shorthand of everyday culture by a bill with a military bearing. The Vimy Foundation has raised about $ 5 million to date. But much like the German army at Vimy Ridge, the Canadian public appears entrenched in its belief that a $ 20 is a $ 20 is a $ 20 — and not a Vimy. ( Only about 600 Canadians have coughed up a Vimy for Vimy since November 2013.)
“I don’t want to diminish the cause at all — the cause is really important — but the odds are long that this rebranding of the $ 20 bill will work,” says Andris Pone.
Pone is the president of Coin, a branding firm. He had to pull a $ 20 bill from his wallet to confirm the Vimy connection before addressing the challenges ahead for the campaign.
“Canadians call the 20- dollar bill the 20- dollar bill, or the 20 ( or 20 bucks), and if there was a new product coming out, something totally new, then attaching the name Vimy to it might attract some more consumer buy- in,” he says.
But the Vimy is not new. It is not what the loonie was in 1987: a shiny coin replacing its paper predecessor, featuring a bird cottagers from coast to coast could recognize.
“The name ‘ loonie’ has grassroots origins,” says Christine Aquino, a spokeswoman at the Royal Canadian Mint. “It came from Canadians when the onedollar coin was first introduced in 1987.”
There was no ad campaign, no catchy slogan, just us hosers, scrutinizing a newfangled thing and slapping it with a name that, in hindsight, seems obvious. Robert- Ralph Carmichael, the rural Ontario artist responsible for the coin’s design, says the loonie’s fame has a downside.
“I was labelled as just a loonie man and I didn’t like that,” he says, chuckling. “I put so much more energy into my painting.” As for the Vimy, he applauds the idea, but also expressed skepticism that it would take. “Vimy sounds like something an Australian might say,” he says.
To investigate further, I polled a convenience store worker, a currency exchange employee and a bank teller, asking if they knew what a Vimy was.
Their answers: “No.” “No.” And: “Is it a coin? We have coins from other countries at the bank. Where is it from?”
Jeremy Diamond, executive director of The Vimy Foundation, is aware of the fight he is in. But he is not going to surrender. Never. No matter the odds.
“If we came up with a $ 30 bill and called it the Vimy, that might make things a bit easier for us,” Diamond says. “My kids are the only ones that use the term Vimy now, as far as I know. My son, I don’t know how many times he has said to me, ‘ Dad, can we buy this?’
“And I will say, ‘ Well,’ and then he’ll say to me: ‘ Whatever, Dad, you have a Vimy in your wallet.’ “I love him for saying that.” Vimy is a name worth loving, and a bill worth turning over in our hands to look upon, again, while we think about the war memorial in France and what it represents. It tells the story of how we got to be who we are as a country.
And that, to me, is worth a Vimy.