by Tod Maffin
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Money is a mirror — it’s one of the few places a nation tells you what it values most.
This week, the Bank of Canada announced we are updating our mirror.
First, the new $20 bill will become vertical, and it'll have the King’s face on the front. But what I think is more important is the b-side.
On the back is the Canadian National Vimy Memorial in France. It’s a memorial to 3,598 Canadians who died in four days of fighting in April of 1917, on a ridge that had chewed up better-resourced armies for two years before we got there.
T O D B I T
Large sections of the Vimy memorial park are mowed by sheep, not machines, because unexploded First World War ordnance still lies beneath the grass and it is too dangerous for anyone to run a mower over it.
Kids fought. 16, 17. They lied about their age to be able to serve their country.
Two Different Reflections
The United States has its own proud history of bravery and sacrifice. But it's always seemed peculiar to me that the backs of most of their bills are government buildings. The U.S. Treasury. The White House. The Capitol. Independence Hall.
They're nice buildings, don't get me wrong, but every single one of them is a seat of power. A place where people who already have authority go to use it.
America's money looks in the mirror and shows itself its own institutions… gleaming, official institutions.
Ours shows:
a field where thousands of young men bled out in the mud so the rest of us could argue about hockey trades
a museum dedicated to human rights
a Black Nova Scotian businesswoman and civil rights icon
a Coast Guard icebreaker that works on Arctic science
medical innovation like Canada's invention of insulin and the pacemaker
T O D B I T
Frederick Banting sold the patent for insulin to the University of Toronto for a single dollar, saying the discovery "belongs to the world, not to me," and at 32 he became the youngest person ever to win the Nobel Prize in Medicine.
Looking Twice
I have a fiction podcast series called Mirror Falls. (People say it's like the Vinyl Cafe or Lake Wobegon, but with a spy thriller running through it.) In the podcast, I come back to a line often that features in the plot: "In the right hands, a mirror can hide something you expect to see. Or reveal something you never knew ever existed."
It's easy to think that Canadian modesty is a personality defect that eventually we'll get around to fixing. But we won't, because it's not a defect at all.
A country that isn't obsessed with flattering itself has more room left over to actually remember what it cost to become a country in the first place.
So next time you get a Canadian bill in your hands, don't just jam it into your pocket. Look at both sides first. Let it reveal something maybe you didn't know existed.
That's the thing about mirrors.
They only tell you the truth if you're willing to look.
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Last Week:
The Funny Bone
Donald Trump mistakes Bank of Canada for retail bank
by Greg Kearney; used under licence.
What You Missed This Week
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Made in Canada
This week, see Tod and Jocelyn’s Buy Canada projects:
Main Street Canada: A directory of small Canadian businesses impacted by the American tariffs that you can support
Unplug America: A list of Canadian technology that you can use to leave American technology behind
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