5 Dollars

The Bank of Montreal was Canada's oldest chartered bank and effectively acted as the government's fiscal agent for much of the nineteenth century — a role that gave its notes an unusually wide geographic circulation, accepted well beyond Quebec. The British American Bank Note Company, formed in 1866 through a merger of two American firms that had relocated operations to Canada, held a near-monopoly on Canadian chartered bank printing by the 1880s and produced work of consistently high intaglio quality.

By 1888, the Dominion's 1871 Bank Act framework required chartered banks to maintain specie reserves backing their circulation. Notes of this period were redeemable on demand, which drove fairly rapid turnover — heavily worn examples from the 1880s issues are common precisely because they stayed in active use until worn out or redeemed.