Canadian wingnut senator Mike Duffy is in disgrace over the news
that he submitted fraudulent expense claims totalling $90,000 and
secretly borrowed a like sum from the Prime Minister's Chief of Staff to
pay it (and kill an auditor's investigation into his conduct). So Dan
Murphy drew an editorial cartoon depicting a notional Canadian $90,000
bill bearing Senator Duffy's leering face. But the toon only ran
briefly, because the Bank of Canada threatened Canadian newspapers with
criminal prosecution for counterfeiting if they ran it.
That gets to the crux of the matter. Laws that fight counterfeiting are
fine (though really, any forger gifted enough to back-engineer a
single-sided cartoon of a $90,000 bill that bears the image of Mike
Duffy and a hologram of Nigel Wright deserves a medal, not jail time)
but the Bank of Canada has no business playing Thought Police.
Parodies of bank notes are nothing new. In 1819, British cartoonist
George Cruikshank, angered after seeing a woman hanged for passing a
forged note, drew a Bank of England note that featured 11 men and women
dangling from nooses. During the currency panic of 1837, a series of
“shin plasters” — typically five- and six-cent bills — poked fun at U.S.
economic policy.
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