Canada announces women candidates for note

By Arthur L. Friedberg

Published: Apr 30, 2016, 5 AM

A Canadian woman will be featured on the first bank note of the country’s next paper currency series in 2018. Some 26,000 submissions were made to the Bank of Canada website set up for nominations.

Coin World illustration.

Nellie McClung, a crusader for women’s rights and one of the Famous Five, is among candidates for the Bank of Canada’s next series of notes, to be issued starting in 2018. Shown is an earlier note depicting a vignette of the Famous Five, leaders of the women's rights movement.

Image in the public domain.

A Canadian woman will be featured on the first bank note of the country’s next paper currency series in 2018. By the time of the April 15 deadline, 26,000 submissions had been made to the Bank of Canada website set up for nominations. All these came within a month of when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced the initiative to choose a woman for the first time since the $50 Famous Five for women’s rights in 2004.

Among the well known candidates are Lucy Maud Montgomery, author of Ann of Green Gables; Laura Secord, a heroine from the War of 1812; Nellie McClung, a crusader for women’s rights and one of the Famous Five; civil rights activist Viola Desmond; artist and writer Emily Carr; Tookoolito, an Inuk guide and translator for Arctic expeditions; and Agnes MacPhail, the first women ever elected to the House of Commons.

The names all go to a seven-member advisory committee appointed by the bank.

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