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With all the blogging we’ve been doing for Voices from the Engraver, you’d think we had nothing else on our exhibition plate. We do, actually, and it’s called CENTimental Journey. This temporary exhibition, hosted at the Canadian Museum of History, walks you through more than 150 years of the Canadian 1 cent piece.

We are coming up on a year since we closed the doors on the physical museum. During that year, we’ve worked very hard to make sure everybody knows that we are still a functioning museum and one that will be opening its doors again in a few years on a beautiful new space, with an expanded mission and mandate.

27 June 2014 - 26 June 2015 This temporary exhibition, hosted at the Canadian Museum of History, walked visitors through more than 150 years of the Canadian 1-cent piece. Featuring 12 significant coins, the exhibition evoked Canadian and world history even as it profiled our humble pennies. The coins were backed up with entertaining graphics […]

The paper money that’s not made of paper is our first series to be printed on a state-of-the-art polymer material that is both more resilient and harder to counterfeit.

This first series for which the Canadian public was consulted features scenes representing culture and achievement. It is also the first predominantly computer aided design.

New reproduction techniques available to counterfeiters encouraged the production of a new series of notes with reflective elements and simpler designs that would make printing defects more apparent- birds are also politically neutral.

Counterfeiters were catching up and new approaches were needed to foil them; the layering of multiple colours and elegant swashes of geometric patterns were the key design features of this series.

A completely new approach to Canadian note design was undertaken after the accession of Queen Elizabeth II, one that was representative of a Canadian vision of itself.

The release of this partly re-designed series of notes was prompted by the death of King George V in 1936 and new legislation requiring bilingual notes.

Though not designed or produced by the Bank of Canada, this series was the first to be issued by our new central bank— going into circulation on the day it opened.