March 18, 2004
Borden? Come on, people.
I guess this is what you get for letting the central bank be in charge of actually designing banknotes, as opposed to, oh, I don't know, somebody else.
Borden wouldn't have been my first choice. What about Baldwin and Lafontaine together? Brock? For that matter, Trudeau's been dead long enough. So has Pearson.
Or we could have had Abrasive Reformers(tm): William Lyon Mackenzie, with sturdy fellows trudging through the snow with pikes and flintlock shotguns on the back*, or Emily Murphy with some suffragettes.
Or we could have had Stan Rogers, if it comes to that. Lots of raw material for the poetry-in-three-point-type thing on the back of the bill. I wouldn't be able to resist 'With one fat ball, the Yank stove us in,' more or less applicable according to the state of the money market, but you may have other ideas. It would be worth it for the French translation alone: 'God damn them all!'| 'Tout le monde au diable!', and so forth.
Borden. Heaven preserve us.
* Mackenzie was a crazy man
He wore his wig askew,
He donned three bulky overcoats
In case the bullets flew.