5 Dollars Canadian Bank of Commerce

The Canadian Bank of Commerce was one of the major chartered banks operating under the Bank Act, which permitted private note issue well into the twentieth century — Canada didn't centralize currency issuance under the Bank of Canada until 1935, and chartered banks retained the right to circulate their own notes until 1950. The 1921 series came at a complicated moment: post-war deflation had hammered commodity prices, and western agricultural regions were under serious financial strain.

The American Bank Note Company operated a Ottawa plant specifically to handle Canadian chartered bank work, keeping sensitive currency printing domestic rather than routing it through their New York facility as had been common in earlier decades.