Canada for Americans: The Money

Americans are generally aware of Canada. We know it's up there, but we tend to think of it as being kind of like another row of states across the top. It isn't. Many things are the same in Canada, but many are quite different, sometimes in odd ways. So here are some lessons learned by an American who's spent the last few years living in Canada and occasionally stumbling over odd differences.

One of the first ones you run into is the money. Canadian money takes some getting used to for Americans. Let's start with the coinage. There's a lot more of it. Canada has pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters, just as we do. Quarters are useful in vending machines, but anything smaller than that is pretty much not worth carrying around. So far so good. But then you discover there's two more coins to go.

There is no dollar bill in Canada. Instead, they have a dollar coin. It's got the Queen on the front, and a loon on the back, swimming on a woodland lake somewhere. So it's called the Loonie. It's not quite round. The Loonie actually has eleven sides. I guess they did this so you could feel the very faint corners in your pocket and know what kind of coin it was. But all the other coins are round. It's odd.

And then there's a two-dollar coin. If one dollar's a Loonie, two dollars is... that's right, a Toonie. The Toonie is round, but it's strange in its own way. It's actually made of two different metals. There's a disc-shaped inner core that's mostly copper, with the Queen on the front and a polar bear on the rear. Then there's an outer ring made of nickel that almost doubles the size of the coin. It looks like someone took a penny and hammered it into the middle of a fifty-cent piece or something.

At that point you're out of coins. The bills work more or less the same way American bills do, except that there's no $1 bill. The only surprising thing about the paper money is that the bills are all different colors. Each has a portrait on the front and a more symbolic set of images on the back.

The $5 - the smallest denomination bill in Canada - is blue. The portrait on the front is one Sir Wilfred Laurier, who was the first French-Canadian to become Prime Minister. (The French in Canada are a huge, huge Pandora's box. They'll need - and would no doubt demand - their own separate series of articles...) On the back is a winter scene of kids playing hockey. Because it's Canada. One more interesting note on the $5 bill. Since replacing the old $1 bill with the Loonie seemed to go over well, and people also liked the Toonie, in 2005 the Government floated the idea of getting rid of the $5 bill as well and replacing it with a coin. That was apparently a step too far. The public ridiculed the idea and it was quickly dropped.

The $10 bill is purple. The guy on the front is Sir John A. McDonald, who is kind of the George Washington of Canada. He was instrumental in forming the nation of Canada (in 1867 mind you) out of a group of separate provinces, and became the first Prime Minister. He was also a major driving force behind the Canadian transcontinental railway. The back. I'm going to be honest with you. Nobody really knows what the heck's going on on the back of the $10. There's a dove, and there's a member of the armed forces looking at something with binoculars, and there's some people standing around beneath arches. It's got something to do with Remembrance Day, which is the Canadian version of Veteran's Day. (It's remained more closely tied to the World Wars, especially World War I, than it has in the states and seems to be held a little more sacred here.)

The $20 is the workhorse. It's what comes out of ATMs, and the bill you most commonly see. It's a green that's quite similar to the green of US money. It's got the Queen on the front. On the back are several First Nations artistic motifs. The main one is a sculpture called the Spirit of Haida Gwai, which is really neat actually. Its a huge canoe full of various figures from the mythology of the Haida people of the Queen Charlotte islands. It's meant to be placed on a large flat surface that becomes the "sea" the canoe's traveling. And the figures are all packed into this canoe in the middle of this large flat space, and they're not really getting along, but they need each other to keep the canoe afloat. It's got social and environmental resonance and it's really powerful to look at. It's also really important to Canadians. Not only did they put it on the $20, but there are copies all over the place, including at the Embassy in Washington DC, and at the Vancouver airport.

Above the $20, there are $50 and $100 bills but you seldom see them. A lot of businesses won't take them at all for fear of counterfeiting. The $50 is red. The portrait on the front is William Lyon Mackenzie King, who was Prime Minister off and on throughout the first half of the 20th century. The back is, once again, kind of symbolic and strange. It has to do with the rights and freedoms Canadians have struggled to establish. The figures on the back represent the "Famous Five," five women who fought a legal battle in 1927 over female suffrage. The "Persons Case" ultimately decided that women are indeed "persons" who could serve in the Canadian Senate. And various other legal rights followed from that.

And finally the $100 bill is brown. The portrait on the front is Sir Robert Laird Borden, another famous Prime Minister. This one led the country through the First World War. The images on the back are about exploration. There's a satellite with a satellite-style image of Canada, and a birch bark canoe along with a reproduction of one of the earliest maps of Canada from the 17th century.

So that's Canadian money. Now if some of it shows up in your wallet, you'll at least know who you're looking at and you can impress party guests with your knowledge. But there's a lot more to know about Canada than that. At some point, we're going to have to explain the political process...