20 Dollars

The Bank of Hamilton was absorbed by the Canadian Bank of Commerce in 1924, making this 1914 note one of the later issues from an institution that had operated since 1872. By the time this note entered circulation, Canadian chartered bank currency was already living on borrowed time — the Finance Act of 1914 had reshuffled the relationship between the government and private bank issuance, and the eventual 1944 monopoly by the Bank of Canada was already philosophically inevitable.

The American Bank Note Company maintained a production facility in Ottawa, so this was genuinely printed domestically despite the firm's New York origins. The $20 denomination was the workhorse of commercial transactions at the chartered bank level.