5 Dollars Royal Bank of Canada

The Royal Bank of Canada's 1909 charter series was produced at a pivotal moment in the bank's expansion — it had only recently relocated its head office from Montreal to consolidate dominance over an increasingly national commercial network. The American Bank Note Company's Ottawa plant, operating as a Canadian satellite of the New York parent, handled a significant share of Canadian chartered bank printing in this period, and the quality of intaglio work from that facility was generally consistent with the parent company's standards.

Chartered bank notes in Canada remained legal private currency until the Bank of Canada Act of 1934 effectively ended the practice, meaning notes from this 1909 series could theoretically have circulated for over two decades.