Understaffed: Treasury should have hired a botanist

A botanist has said the Bank of Canada printed the wrong species of maple leaf on its new plastic bank notes.

Not only is the maple leaf on the notes incorrect, it’s also foreign! This is one skillset HR should not have overlooked...

The bank notes carry the image of the Norwegian maple leaf, instead of the sugar maple leaf, for which the country is renowned.

While an untrained eye might not at first spot the difference, to botanists the error is a glaring one.

“The maple leaf (on the currency) is the wrong species,” Sean Blaney, a botanist who tracks plants for the Atlantic Canada Conservation Data Centre told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

The Norway maple was imported from Europe and is now also common in North America. Blaney said it was probably the most popular tree along streets in central and eastern Canada, and had been naturalised to Canada, but was not the sugar maple.

The central bank said the image on the new bills was purposefully designed not to represent any specific species but rather to be a combination of various kinds. “It is not a Norway maple leaf. It is a stylised maple leaf and it is what it ought to be,” a Bank of Canada spokesman said.

So were they just covering their tracks, or was it a genuine creative decision?

Blaney doesn’t buy the bank’s explanation. "I think it's just an after-the-fact excuse," he said.

“That may have been their intention, to not have it be a specific species of maple, but they should have drawn it differently if that were the case, because the maple that they've drawn is quite clearly a Norway maple.”

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