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Viola Desmond has been chosen as the first Canadian woman to grace the face of the country’s next banknote.
Desmond is known as Canada’s Rosa Parks, because who nine years before Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger, Desmond sat in a white-only section of a Nova Scotia movie theatre.
This morning Finance Minister Bill Morneau announced Desmond will be on the $10 bill when the next series goes into circulation in 2018.
Morneau said “she represents courage, strength and determination-qualities we should all aspire to every day.”
The other four woman in contention to be on the banknote were Six Nations poet Emily Pauline Johnson Tekahionwake, who performed across Canada, the U.S and England during an age of institutional racism and sexism, engineer Elizabeth MacGill, athlete Fanny (Bobbie) Rosenfeld, and suffragette Idola Saint-Jean.
