20 Dollars

The Canadian Bank of Commerce was one of Canada's dominant chartered banks, and its 1917 series was issued against the backdrop of wartime finance — Dominion currency controls were tightening, and chartered bank notes were heading toward eventual phase-out under the 1944 Bank of Canada consolidation. The American Bank Note Company's New York facilities handled production for numerous Canadian chartered institutions during this period, a long-standing arrangement that predated the war by decades.

Chartered bank notes of this era are prone to edge splits and paper brittleness along fold lines — a known weakness of the cotton stock used by ABNC for Canadian clients in the mid-to-late 1910s.