Desmond’s banknote is the culmination of the Bank of Canada’s #bankNOTEable campaign, launched on International Women’s Day (March 8) in early 2016 with the goal of selecting an iconic Canadian woman to be featured on a bank note. A combination of public nominations and an independent advisory committee chose a long list of 12 notable women followed by a short list of five candidates, which included E. Pauline Johnson, the Indigenous poet, Elizabeth MacGill, the first woman in Canada to receive an engineering degree, Fanny Rosenfeld, Olympian, Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame inductee and journalist, Idola Saint-Jean, Quebecois suffragette and activist, and Viola Desmond.

The campaign came after Merna Forster, a Victoria-based historian, writer and educator, received more than 73,000 signatures on her petition for the Bank of Canada to feature a Canadian woman on a banknote. Read more about her petition.

“This is an important step towards gender equality on our money, and I hope that we can look forward to seeing another Canadian woman join her in the next series,” said Forster. “Wouldn’t it be great to honour an Indigenous woman on the new $5 bill?”

Viola Desmond’s movie ticket is featured in Canadian Geographic’s upcoming special issue The Story of Canada in 150 Objects, produced in partnership with The Walrus for Canada’s sesquicentennial. Here’s a sneak peek written by Harry Wilson.

“All I wanted was to see a movie.” So says the character who plays Viola Desmond in the Heritage Minutes film of the black business owner’s experience with racial discrimination in a -theatre in New Glasgow, N.S., in 1946. Desmond took a stand when she refused to move from the main floor to the balcony, where non-whites usually sat — a decision that saw her arrested and eventually convicted of failing to pay a one-cent tax (the price difference between a balcony and main-floor seat). It soon became obvious, however, that Desmond had violated not the law but the theatre’s unspoken custom of segregation. The courage she showed in refusing to be a second-class citizen wasn’t officially acknowledged until Nova Scotia pardoned her in 2010, 45 years after she died and 64 years after her “crime.”