Nah’msayin?

Plenty Wrong With the New Twenty

OpinionsAlex Manley — Published November 20, 2012

As part of an effort to be as cool as Australia, Canada’s in the process of updating its bills to be super-duper high-tech.

Although new hundreds and fifties have already been introduced, that’s probably out of the range of your average undergrad (cashiers excluded).

Unless you’re living under a rock of extreme poverty, though, you probably found out this week after the new $20 bill was introduced on Nov. 7.

Though they vary in degrees of seriousness, there have been all sorts of complaints about the new twenty. For instance:

— The First Nations art on the back of the old twenty has been replaced a picture of the Vimy Ridge memorial, painting Canada as a military nation rather than the peace lovers that we are.

— The new green is lime green. Why.

— If you put the bills in or near sources of heat (clothes dryer, toaster oven, Earth’s molten core, director Michael Mann) they tend to shrivel up and their souls escape, depriving them of any monetary value.

— The bills stick together in ways the old cotton bills didn’t, meaning you have to be careful when handing money to someone, lest you be handing them two or three times as much.

But I’ve got my own complaints, namely:

— These bills are impossible to counterfeit. They’re going to put Canada’s hardworking money counterfeiters out of work, leading to a brain drain as our top-level counterfeit talent all moves to the United States, whose bills are still laughably old-world.

— The new twenty seriously looks like it should be worth more, like $25.50 or something. Does it seriously cost only $20 to make one of these? Are they outsourcing these bills to unskilled mint workers in developing countries? (That’s how money works, right? Its value is equal to its production costs. That’s why the dime is smaller than the nickel. I think.)

— Seriously, these bills don’t stick together enough. Every time someone hands me a bill at work (I’m a cashier, fine, don’t judge me), it’s just one bill, preventing me from skimming extra twenties off the top. How’s a struggling student supposed to make it in this economy?

— The hologram queen in the silver strip is mega creepy. She stares out at all Canadians like ceiling cat, watching you masturbate. I’m just glad it isn’t Stephen Harper. Yet.