5 Cents Kananaskis Camp

Kananaskis Camp 130 was a prisoner-of-war camp in Alberta that held German and Italian POWs during and after World War II. The Canadian government authorized the issuance of scrip for internal camp use under the Geneva Convention, which prohibited the confiscation of prisoner wages and required that they have some means of making purchases — hence the parallel economy of camp currency.

The 1946 date places this note in the postwar wind-down period, when many prisoners were still awaiting repatriation. By then, Camp 130 had also briefly housed some of the German officers implicated in the 1943 Cowichan Bay escape plot.