Canada's new $10 bill featuring Nova Scotia human rights icon Viola Desmond has been named banknote of the year.
The bill, which also features a map of Halifax's historic north end as well as the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg, was honoured in a vote by the International Bank Note Society.
The society says in a news release that the Desmond bill was a favourite of its voting membership right from the start.
The purple polymer bill was the first vertically oriented banknote issued in Canada.
Desmond is the first black person -- and the first non-royal woman -- on a regularly circulating Canadian banknote.
The bill marks a growing recognition of Desmond's refusal to leave the whites-only section of a Nova Scotia movie theatre on Nov. 8, 1946 -- nearly a decade before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus in Alabama -- and the seminal role it played in Canada's civil rights movement.
