5 Piastres

The Banque d'Hochelaga was a Montreal-based French-Canadian chartered bank founded in 1873 to serve a commercial community that felt systematically underserved by the anglophone banking establishment. By 1897, it had expanded well beyond its original Hochelaga neighbourhood base, though it remained distinctly Franco-Québécois in character until its 1924 merger into what became the Banque Canadienne Nationale.

ABNC held engraving contracts with most Canadian chartered banks of this period, producing notes for institutions that lacked any domestic high-security printing infrastructure. The "5 Piastres" denomination wording rather than "5 Dollars" is the detail that anchors this squarely in Quebec's parallel commercial French — piastre being the common vernacular unit regardless of what federal legislation called the currency.