The Canadian five dollar bill is blue in colour and bears the image of Sir Wilfrid Laurier, the country's first French-Canadian prime minister. Laurier's portrait is on the front of the bill, along with an image of the West Block of the Canadian parliament buildings. Canada's coat of arms is also depicted on the front. The back of the bill features a scene depicting children playing hockey and other winter sports on an outdoor rink.

The current five dollar bill was introduced in the early 21st century during a redesign of the nation's paper currency. The fiver was the second bill to be redesigned (the ten dollar bill was redesigned first because it bears the image of John A. Macdonald, Canada's first prime minister). Before one can understand exactly what was different about the new bill, one must understand what the old bill looked like.

The "old" Canadian five dollar bills

The original Canadian five dollar bill was also blue, but a far more washed out blue than its successor. Laurier's portrait depicted him face-on; that is, facing the person holding the bill. The entire bill was blue, with the writing and images of Laurier and the parliament buildings etched in a darker shade than the background. The image of the parliament buildings included the Red Enseign, which had been Canada's flag when Laurier was prime minister. A friend of my dad's believed this to be a mistake and enthusiastically bought other people's five dollar bills from them because he thought they would be worth a great deal of money once the mistake was caught. Wrong.

This version of the Canadian five dollar bill is widely thought of as the "old" version. But it's not the oldest, oh no.

The first three series of Canadian paper currencies were far more regal-looking and were more characteristic of the historical time periods during which they were introduced. Most Canadian paper currency depicted the British monarch until 1954, and the five dollar bill was no exception. When the first five dollar bills were printed in 1935, they were a greenish colour and bore an image of Edward, Prince of Wales. Edward would famously ascend to the throne that year and later abdicate in order to marry his divorced love. He wasn't on currency for very long.

The back of the 1935 five dollar bill featured a scene depicting the harnessing of electricity. 

In 1937, new currency depicting King George VI was printed. The portrait was in the bill's centre, and the bill took on a blue tint for the first time. The bill's back depicted the same scene -- the electricy one -- but it was also blue. These bills were in use until after George VI's death in 1952.

The next set of paper currency was released in 1954, two years after Elizabeth II became Queen. The five dollar bill remained blue in colour, but the portrait of the monarch was on the bill's right-hand side. A much lighter blue -- something more like an azure -- was also used for this bill. The back of the bill depicted a winter scene in the Yukon region.

Elizabeth II remained on the Canadian five dollar bill until 1969. She was originally slated to be depicted on the Bank of Canada's new releases, but the then-minister of finance opted to include former Canadian prime ministers on the new currency in order to help build national identity.

Up until this point, former prime ministers had only been depicted on larger, less commonly used bills such as the one hundred and one thousand dollar bills.

Laurier was chosen as the prime minister for the five dollar bill, and his portrait was placed where that of the Queen had been on the previous issue. There were also stylistic changes made to both the front and back of the bill. More artistic designs were used on the front, and the back now depicted a salmon seiner vessel off the coast of Vancouver, British Columbia.

There were two reissues of this version of the bill during the 1970s. Apart from some minor changes -- the colour of the serial numbers, for instance -- the designs remained largely the same.

The next currency series was nicknamed the "birds of Canada" series because the back of each bill depicted birds commonly found in the country. Laurier's portrait remained on the paper's right side, but for the first time the Canadian parliament buildings were also depicted on the bill. The building was just to the right of Laurier's head, with the Red Ensign flying atop the Peace Tower.

The back of the bill, in keeping with the "birds of Canada" theme, featured the belted kingfisher. The bill was still blue.

The "birds of Canada" currency was the first to feature security features intended to thwart counterfeiters. Unfortuntately, counterfeitting was still a substantial problem in the earlier party of the 21st century and a new series was commissioned.

The "new" Canadian five dollar bills

The "Canadian Journey" currency set was unveiled in 2001. The new five dollar bill was released in 2002, still depicting Laurier and being blue. Unlike its predecessors, the new fiver also incorporated elements of gold colouring and took a drastic turn in terms of the portraits. Unlike all other previous Canadian currency in which the person depicted was shown face-on, the Queen and prime ministers were shown at an angle.

Laurier's portrait was moved to the left-hand side of the bill. The parliament buildings were still depicted just to the right of his face, though this bill focused on parliament's West Block as opposed to the entire parliament.

The bill also included more advanced features, such as the use of Braille and high-tech security initiatives. Certain elements designed to prevent counterfeitting are only visible using ultraviolet light.

An upgraded five dollar note, with more security features like those used on the higher denominations of the "Canadian Journey" series, was entered into circulation in 2006.

The back of the bill depicts, as mentioned, an image of Canadian children playing winter sports. It also includes a quotation from Roch Carrier's "The Hockey Sweater" that puts the importance of winter sports such as hockey to the Canadian identity into context.

The fact that the back of the Canadian five dollar bill features hockey has amused tourists, particularly those from the U.S. Conan O'Brien devoted an entire segment to it while filming a troika of shows in Toronto.

The future?

The Canadian government has been publicly musing about a five dollar coin for years, and put the question to the public (informally) in 2005. The Bank of Canada ditched the one and two dollar bills in favour of coins during the 1990s, and there has been much speculation that the five dollar bill will be next to go.

The reaction to the proposal was not favourable, even though the government had proposed using the money saved by using coins instead of paper currency to fund the Canadian Olympic team. It looks as though, for the moment, Laurier is safely tucked inside wallets and cash registers across the country.

I wrote my new song on a five-dollar bill
But I won't be able to sing it until
I get hot on the trail for to pick up the track
Of the dirty little thief and get my five bucks back.

Five Dollar Bill is a country music album by the Corb Lund Band. It was released in 2002 by Stoney Plain Records, a mostly country/folk/roots label based in Edmonton. It is much closer to Ian Tyson or Tom Russell than it is to Garth Brooks or Kenny Chesney: vast swaths of it sound like an homage to Hank Williams. It is also very Canadian, immediately identifiably so: vast swaths of it are love songs about Alberta. It makes me desperately homesick for a place that I abandoned.

Western Canada is not a homogeneous unit, even though federal politicians often treat it that way. I was born in British Columbia and still spend summers there, sometimes. I grew up in Alberta, but I don't admit it very often. My parents live in Saskatchewan, and that's where I tell people I'm from.

My family moved from Alberta to Saskatchewan when I was in high school—a move met with much incredulity from everyone we knew: Saskatchewan is in the grip of a recession and has been for years; Alberta was just coming into a Gold Rush-esque economic boom—and I spent some months trying to figure out which I would self-identify as if someone asked, Albertan or Saskatchewanian. I eventually settled on the latter; people from Alberta are generally considered brash and conservative and no-one knows what to expect from a Saskatchewanian, which I have found advantageous. But Corb Lund's ballad about the prairies of Alberta nearly changed my mind.

My introduction to the Corb Lund Band came by way of a song aired on CBC Radio 1 some weekday afternoon. I was struck by the fact that it was country music and not pop music in disguise and by the way the chorus stuck in my mind, but not enough to have written down the artist's name.

Some months later, I heard it again at the Edmonton Folk Festival, played by a lanky fellow in a very fine hat. I bought his album the same afternoon.

I didn't enjoy living in southern Alberta. (Too small a town, too much wind, too stiflingly conservative.) But Five Dollar Bill makes me wistful and nostalgic for hard drinking in country bars and threatening to marry roughnecks or slide guitarists and shitty down-on-their-luck small towns hopefully huddled around the Crowsnest Highway, every ten kilometres. I lived in Lethbridge; Corb Lund is from outside Taber, forty minutes away. His bass player, Kurt Ciesla, is also from Lethbridge; his mother and my grandmother quilt together sometimes. Southern Alberta is smaller than you might expect.

Some highlights. The titular track is a pedal steel guitar-fuelled romp about running into customer service difficulties while smuggling rum into the United States during Prohibition. Corb Lund sings each verse seemingly without stopping for breath. This isn't a studio thing, either; he sounds no different live.

"Short Native Grasses (Prairies of Alberta)", the song that makes me homesick, ought to have been the song that the provincial government endorsed as an official centennial ballad in 2005. Instead, someone else wrote a song specifically for the occasion that is bad beyond my powers of description.

"Time to Switch to Whiskey", the album's token drinking song, begins with a crackly field recording of a much older drinking song—"Rye whiskey, rye whiskey, rye whiskey, I cry/If I don't get rye whiskey, I think I may die." The liner notes assure me that the backup vocals on the song itself were performed by a group of louts who were "appropriately gunned for the duration".

"(Gonna) Shine Up My Boots" is an upbeat ditty about wooing the ladies, or attempting to. It is the song I sing to myself when I am about to embark upon a night on the town.

Corb Lund is a pretty fine guitar player and has a pleasant voice, sometimes laced with a bit of Nashville twang that doesn't quite sound right coming from a southern Albertan but is perfectly appropriate in the context of Hank Williams-style old-school country. His backing band is modest: mostly it is comprised of Kurt Ciesla, who is absolutely stellar, and drummer Ryan Vikedal, formerly of Nickelback. (Stop laughing. He's not bad.)

I've been listening to this album a lot over the last few days, and thinking about visiting my grandparents in Lethbridge soon. I know very well that when I do go back, I'll remember why I wanted to leave in the first place. But damnit, I'll still go back expecting to fall in love, and it will be Corb Lund's fault.

A tracklist:

01. Five Dollar Bill (2:33)
02. Expectation and the Blues (2:56)
03. Short Native Grasses (Prairies of Alberta) (3:46)
04. No Roads Here (3:21)
05. Apocalyptic Modified Blues (3:03)
06. Intro/Jack of Diamonds (0:36)
07. Time to Switch to Whiskey (2:53)
08. Roughest Neck Around (3:12)
09. Daughter Don't You Marry No Guitar Picker (2:23)
10. (Gonna) Shine Up My Boots (2:13)
11. Buckin' Horse Rider (3:34)
12. She Won't Come to Me (3:45)

The entire album clocks in at less than forty minutes. I recommend that you listen to it.