10 Piastres

The Banque d'Hochelaga was a Montreal-based French-Canadian chartered bank founded in 1874 to serve the working-class parishes of eastern Montreal — a deliberate institutional counterweight to the Anglophone financial establishment. It survived well past many of its contemporaries, eventually merging into the Banque Canadienne Nationale in 1924.

By 1889, private bank note issuance in Canada was already operating under tight Dominion regulation, with chartered banks required to hold Dominion notes as reserves against their own circulation. The Canada Bank Note Company, operating out of Montreal, handled much of this chartered bank production during the period — a practical near-monopoly on Canadian private note printing that displaced earlier reliance on American Bank Note Company contracts.

P#787 is scarce. Hochelaga's notes from this decade circulated hard in a tight regional economy.