Bitchin’ bitches on our cash money

Besides the Queen, women have long been absent from Canada’s currency. However, the Bank of Canada and their “Bank NOTE-able Canadian Women” campaign has sought to resolve that. Announced back on International Women’s day (March 8th), the campaign encouraged Canadians to get involved and start a national conversation about which woman to feature on a Canadian bill. After narrowing down the candidates from 461 to just 5, the committee recently decided that Viola Desmond will be the new face of the $10 bill. But since all these women are important in their own rights, let’s get to know the five who were up for consideration:

Viola Desmond (1914-1965)

While a successful businesswoman and entrepreneur, Viola Desmond is best remembered as an important figure in the history of people of colour in Nova Scotia and Canada. When a movie theatre cashier informed Desmond that she wasn’t “permitted to sell downstairs tickets to you people,” Desmond decided to sit downstairs anyway. The resulting arrest and Desmond’s decision to fight her charges ultimately helped kickstart the Nova Scotian civil rights movement.

Pros:

• Often called “Canada’s Rosa Parks”
• Took a courageous stand, despite her husband discouraging her to do so
• Segregation in Nova Scotia legally ended in 1954, thanks in large part to Desmond’s actions (Also, since when did Nova Scotia have segregation?! Why did we not learn about that in school?)
• She was also a successful businesswoman, selling her own line of beauty products, at a time when very few women worked outside of the home

Con:

• She’s got one of those lame Heritage Minutes about her

Elizabeth “Elsie” MacGill (1905-1980)

Half aeronautical engineer, half active feminist, and complete badass! Elizabeth MacGill both paved the way for women in engineering and helped lead the Canadian feminist movement.

Pros:

• The first woman to graduate from the University of Toronto for electrical engineering and the first women in Canada to earn a master’s degree in aeronautical engineering
• Not only Canada’s first female aircraft designer but the world’s
• Nicknamed the “Queen of the Hurricanes” for her help in designing the Hawker Hurricane fighter plane which flew in World War II
• Served as the national president of the Canadian Federation of Business and Professional Women’s Clubs from 1962-1964
• A key member on the Royal Commission on the Status of Women in Canada (1967-1970)
• Holds dozens of honours and awards, including four honorary doctorates from some of Canada’s top universities

Cons:

• Didn’t found McGill University

Pauline Johnson (1861-1913)

The daughter of a Mohawk chief and an English immigrant, E. Pauline Johnson is best known for her stories and poems, which she shared while touring extensively throughout Canada, the U.S., and England.

Pros:

• Johnson is an actual person of colour that people have sort of heard about in Canadian history!
• She used literature to call people out on their shit (looking at you, white guys who came in and stole a bunch of land from indigenous people)
• She became the chief breadwinner of her family after the death of her father, and supported both herself and her mother with the money gained from her speaking tours despite living in a time where women were almost entirely financially dependent on men.

Cons:

• If you happen to have this new bill and a five in your wallet at the same time, Johnson would have to cozy up with Sir John A. MacDonald, the guy who oversaw the creation of the Indian Act, declared that Indigenous parents couldn’t be trusted to raise their children because they were “savages,” and allowed governmental officials to withhold food from Indigenous people until they moved onto designated reserve land.

Fanny Rosenfeld (1904-1969)

A Canadian Sports Hall of Fame inductee, world record holder, and Olympian, Fanny Rosenfeld wasn’t one to give up in the face of a challenge. Even after contracting arthritis later in her career, she worked as a sports journalist at the Globe and Mail for 20 years.

Pros:

• Rosenfeld stood up for working-class women, downtrodden women, and women whose athletic ambitions were mocked or discouraged.
• She excelled at pretty much every single sport she tried, including tennis, track and field, hockey, lacrosse, basketball, and softball.
• She kicked the asses of lots of far more experienced athletes, despite not having all the proper equipment, and often running in her brother’s swimming trunks.

Cons:

• Sports are cool I guess but is that really what matters to Canadians?

Idola Saint-Jean (1880-1945)

A prominent Quebecois suffragette, Idola Saint-Jean helped bring the vote to women at the provincial level, and was the first woman from Quebec to run in a federal election. She devoted her life to advancing women’s legal status in Canada.

Pros:

• In 1918, Saint-Jean adopted a black orphan girl whose parents had died in the Spanish influenza pandemic, despite the racist attitudes of the time.
• She spent several years working with juvenile delinquents as part of her work with the Montreal Juvenile Court.
• She founded a social-justice-focused magazine in 1933 called La sphère féminine.

Cons:

• If Quebec ever separated from Canada this would get embarrassing.

But with the well-deserved fanfare and excitement that this future bill entails, some serious questions do arise. For one, why is only one woman getting picked to be put on a bill? Why not more? As well, which person is being removed to make room for this woman? With all the bills  already full of important figures, who does one pick to take off? Emma and Matt discuss below:

Emma: Isn’t it a little sad that we have to pick one woman to represent all that women have contributed to Canadian history? Isn’t it a little pitiful that putting a single woman on a single bank note seems so revolutionary and progressive? Why do we have to decide which of these women will stand for 50 per cent of the Canadian population?

Matt: While putting a woman on a bill is long overdue, I’m just a little worried about the Prime Ministers they plan to remove. William Lyon Mackenzie King and Sir Robert Borden are planned to get the boot while John A. MacDonald and Wilfred Laurier are moving to the 50 and 100 dollar bills respectively. As excited as I am about Desmond, I have to admit I’m sad to see King go. He’s like the only old-school PM people have actually heard of. He’s the crazy PM, the one who held seances to talk to his dead mother, but also the PM who lead the country through the Great Depression and World War II. Removing one of the most important and frankly interesting Prime Ministers in Canadian History seems like a bad choice. Instead of removing King, why not the Queen? While she is a woman and Canada’s head of state, she’s not even Canadian! Making room on the coveted $20 bill for Desmond makes perfect sense to me.