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It's difficult to maintain a national identity in a country where nearly all of the inhabitants live within a few miles of the USA, so you can hardly blame Canadians for sometimes feeling that Americans are infiltrating every last aspect of their culture. A tangible expression of this feeling occurred during the 1980s, when every time the Bank of Canada introduced currency with new designs, somebody managed to find American flags hidden in the artwork. The fun began with the introduction of a new $5 bill in May 1986: What Nunziata (and others) found with their magnifying glasses was that the flag flying over the centre block of the Parliament buildings was not an American flag, but the Red Ensign (which, although it was never Canada's official flag, served as Canada's recognized flag before being replaced by the Maple Leaf Flag in 1965): The introduction of a new $2 bill in September 1986 brought claims that it, too, depicted an American flag flying over Parliament (a claim which continues to circulate widely on one of those ubiquitous Internet lists of unusual facts), but as the inset in the image below shows, the flag in question is clearly Canada's current national flag, the Maple Leaf Flag: Three years later, when the Bank of Canada introduced a new $10 bill, the same old rumor was trotted out yet again (perhaps spurred by the implementation of the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement earlier that year): This one does look quite a bit like an American flag at first glance, but the crest (the dark spot in the lower right-hand corner) gives it away as the Red Ensign again: Frightened Americans used to look for Soviet Communists under their beds. Who'd have thought Canadians would top that by looking for American flags over their Parliament?
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