10 Dollars

The Merchants Bank of Canada was among the more aggressive commercial lenders in late nineteenth-century Canada, and its 1886 issues came at a period of genuine institutional confidence — the bank had survived the post-Confederation consolidation years and was expanding branch operations westward. The British American Bank Note Company, established in Ottawa in 1866 and later relocating production to Montreal, had by this point secured a dominant position in Canadian chartered bank printing, and their engraving work of this decade is technically among their strongest.

The bank itself did not survive indefinitely — it was absorbed by the Bank of Montreal in 1922 after a prolonged deterioration in its loan portfolio following the First World War. Notes from the 1886 series had long since left circulation by then, making surviving examples genuinely old paper by Canadian standards.