Between 2001 and 2004, the Bank of Canada issued its updated series of bills, each denomination depicting on its verso a collage of thematically linked cultural images, microscopically captioned with a brief excerpt from a literary text. The series, under the title “Canadian Journey,” aims both to reflect the diversity of Canadian cultural experience and to produce a sense of common tradition and shared values from within that diversity, so the texts chosen for the bills consist of poems – John McRae’s “In Flanders Fields” for the ten-dollar bill – or stories – Roch Carrier’s “The Hockey Sweater” for the five – that Canadians of any ethnic or linguistic background will likely have encountered either in school or in the media.

The two lines (like other texts, presented in both official languages) on the back of the 100 dollar bill are not so widely known, perhaps because they question how we can be said to share any such history: “Do we ever remember that somewhere above the sky in some child’s dream perhaps / Jacques Cartier is still sailing, always on his way always about to discover a new Canada?” This couplet is reshaped from the last six lines of Miriam Waddington’s poem “Jacques Cartier in Toronto,” from her 1992 collection The Last Landscape. Its inclusion on Canadian currency is significant not only because it honors Waddington’s significant contributions to Canadian literary culture, but also because it poses directly the question of how poetry and national history entwine.