There are 600 million twenty dollar bills in circulation in Canada -- more than any other denomination. Starting on Sept. 29, the Bank of Canada will start replacing every single one of them with a new bill. The new bill has a pile of anti-counterfeit measures. It also celebrates Canadian arts and culture and does so by including a quote from Franco-Manitoban author Gabriel Roy and by showing four pieces of art by Bill Reid. Queen Elizabeth II is on the bill, of course, and has been continuously since 1954. In fact, Elizabeth was on Canada's first-ever twenty issued in 1935. She was 9-year-old Princess Elizabeth at the time.
The new bill costs the Bank of Canada 9 cents each to print, up from about 6.5 cents from the current version, which debuted in 1991. The Bank, incidentally, spends more than $100-million a year on currency research, development, and printing. The design and development of the new twenty bill cost $12-million alone. I know all of this because I spent a few hours at a press conference on the subject yesterday for a brief report for CTV National News. My Globe and Mail colleague Peter Kennedy reported on the launch of the bill from Vancouver where the Bank organized its main news conference. Here's a direct link to the video.