MELTED CANADIAN POLYMER NOTES

When Nicholos Billard's employer at an Ontario construction company gave him eight newly printed Canadian $100 bills as a Christmas bonus in 2011, he tossed them in an empty coffee can.

The next morning, they were shriveled—by the heat of a nearby radiator, says his mother, who made local headlines when she tried to get the bills replaced.

Canada started rolling out new, polymer-based $100 bills two years ago, followed by 50s and then, last November, 20s. The money—slick like a sheet of plastic, hard to fold and partly transparent—is more difficult to counterfeit than Canada's old paper-and-cotton bills. Australia and New Zealand have used similar, plasticized notes for years. The U.S. has no plans to introduce them.

They've been a hard sell here so far, forcing the central bank to defend them against a growing list of allegations: They don't work in vending machines; they clump together; they melt.

A more common complaint for all three denominations of the new notes: The plastic bills tend to stick together. Canadian Jeremy Taggart, drummer for alternative-rock band Our Lady Peace, complained in a recent tweet about the currency after accidentally handing a cashier three clingy, new $20 bills when he meant to hand over just one.

"They are sticky, and thin, and annoying," Mr. Taggart says. The bank has said all new bills tend to stick together at first because of how tightly they are packaged, and that the problem will fade.

To read the complete article, see: Canada's New Banknotes Strike Some as Loonie (online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323511804578297993757700724.html)

The Bank of Canada considered celebrating gay marriages, black hockey players, and turban-wearing RCMP officers on its new plastic bank notes — but eventually nixed them all in favour of the more traditional images of a train, a ship and a monument.

Internal documents show that focus groups and a Bank of Canada team reviewed a series of currency images intended in part to reflect the diversity of Canada's population, particularly the country's varied ethnic character.

Images that were considered included a Chinese dragon parade, the swearing in of a new citizen, Toronto's annual Caribbean festival, children of different ethnic backgrounds playing hockey or building a snowman, and a person in a wheelchair playing basketball.

To read the complete article, see: Gay marriage, turban-wearing Mounties nixed as Canadian bank notes: report (www.theprovince.com/business/Canada+nixes+gays+blacks+Sikh+
Mounties+from+plastic+bank+notes/7946218/story.html)

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