Canadians Ask Why Design of $100 Bill Replaced Asian Woman With White One

By IAN AUSTEN

OTTAWA - When the Bank of Canada switched to plastic-based banknotes, it ran the proposed designs past eight focus groups, hoping to avoid controversy or embarrassment.

Well, the wisdom of these particular crowds has instead led the central bank into making a rare apology this week when it was reported that the focus groups had urged the removal of a woman who appeared Asian from the design for the Canadian $100 bill.

The theme of the reverse side of the bill, which went into circulation in November, is “medical innovation.” It includes a vial of insulin, which Canadian scientists were first to use to treat diabetes; a DNA double helix; an electrocardiogram chart; and a woman peering into a microscope.

This was not the exact version that the focus groups saw, however. The Canadian Press news agency reported last week that it had obtained a document summarizing comments from the sessions, which were held in four cities.

“Some have concerns that the researcher appears to be Asian,” the analysis said. “Some believe that it presents a stereotype of Asians excelling in technology and/or the sciences. Others feel that an Asian should not be the only ethnicity represented on the bank notes. Other ethnicities should also be shown.”

It noted that some participants had found that the yellow-brown color of the banknote added to the perception that the scientist was Asian and thus “racialized” the note.

One focus group participant in the region known as Atlantic Canada, the report said, complained that an Asian woman did not represent Canada. But in Toronto, which has a large and prominent Asian community, the report noted that the apparently Asian researcher was well received.

A spokesman for the bank told the news agency that those findings had led to a redesign that made the researcher appear to be of a “neutral” ethnicit y.

But after that report, many Canadians said that the bank's artists had simply turned the researcher into a Caucasian woman.

“Perhaps ignoring the obvious is something central banks just can't help doing,” Jeffery Ewener wrote in a letter published by The Globe and Mail. “But in Canada, at least, they shouldn't have to be told that Caucasian is an ethnic group.”

In an editorial, The Calgary Herald wrote that the bank “unwittingly reinforced the bigoted notion that white skin is neutral, that ethnicity is a quality white people don't have, that white is normal and nonwhite is other.”

After representatives of some Asian-Canadian groups joined those expressing dismay, Mark J. Carney, the governor of the bank, said in a statement that the tentative design shown to the focus groups  “was a Photoshopped image based on an original photograph of a South Asian woman looking through a microscope.” (The bank, in an e-mail, declined to release an image of that prototype.)

Mr. Carney's statement did not address what role the focus groups had played in the development of the final artwork for the banknote.

“Efforts by the bank note designers to avoid depicting a specific individual resulted in an image that appears to represent only one ethnic group,” Mr. Carney said in the statement. “That was not the bank's intention and I apologize to those who were offended.”