- by Anne Finlay-Stewart, Editor

She's "Aunt Aggie" to them – three generations of Grey County women who came to be among the first to see Agnes Macphail on a Canadian ten dollar bill at the launch of the Canada 150 commemorative banknote at Grey Roots.

After months of advocating to get Agnes on a new series of Canadian banknotes, local campaigners were  disheartened to learn last fall that she wasn't even on the short list. But Grey Roots archivist Karin Noble had a secret – she had signed a non-disclosure agreement with the Bank of Canada before she provided them with the research behind the image of Agnes Macphail that was to be on the Canada 150 commemorative banknote. There have only been three other commemorative bank notes in the history of the Bank of Canada, and Grey County's Agnes Macphail joins three other Canadian political pioneers on the fourth.

Agnes grew up in southern Grey County, but after passing her high school entrance exams she boarded in Owen Sound to attend the Owen Sound Collegiate, and travelled the thirty miles home by train only at Christmas and Easter. Agnes completed her high school and normal school (teacher training) in Stratford Ontario and she began a teaching career.

In 1921, the first year women had the vote, Agnes Macphail become the first woman member of the Canadian parliament, representing South-East Grey County as a Progressive for the United Farmers of Ontario. She won her seat three more times as she fought for the rights of women, miners, prisoners, workers, the elderly and the unemployed. She was the first woman to represent Canada at the League of Nations, and sat on its disarmament committee. As the drums grew louder in the years leading to the second world war, Macphail's pacifism may have led to her defeat, but she served another six years in Ontario's provincial legislature as the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) Member for York East.

Agnes Macphail's great-great-grandniece Georjia Benham attends grade one at Macphail School in Flesherton, and her 14 year-old sister Natasha has read her famous ancestor's books. Whatever these young women do in their lives, their options have been broadened by the work and example of their Aunt Aggie.

Only forty million of the commemorative $10 bills bearing Macphail's image will be circulated - one for each Canadian - and every financial institution in Canada will have the notes available over the next few days and weeks.

By the way – in the 1870s, Grey County was known as the "Counterfeit Capital of Canada", but these new notes have modern security features like raised ink, colour shifting images, transparencies, metal images and 3D maple leaves, so we are unlikely to reclaim that infamy.