Canada’s latest $10 Bill showing Viola Desmond has won a major International Banknote Competition beatings the finalists from Venezula, Switzerland and Russia.
The bill beat 15 other banknotes to win the International Bank Note Society award. The current $10 note is purple, and the obverse features a portrait of Viola Desmond, a Black Nova Scotian businesswoman who challenged racial segregation at a film theatre in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia, in 1946. A successful Nova Scotia businesswoman, she defiantly refused to leave a whites-only area of a movie theatre in 1946 and was subsequently jailed, convicted and fined. Her court case was one of the first known legal challenges against racial segregation brought forth by a Black woman in Canada.
This Bill was introduced on 8 December 2016 by the Minister of Finance and the Governor of the Bank of Canada.
