50 Cents - C. Verreault Petroleum La Baie, Quebec

A privately issued trade note — or more precisely, a billet de dépannage — from a Quebec petroleum retailer, almost certainly produced for use as change currency during coin shortages or as a customer loyalty instrument. Improthèque Inc. was a Quebec-based commercial printer with no connection to security printing; these notes carried no formal anti-counterfeiting measures, which was legally permissible for private scrip of this kind in Canada provided it was not presented as government tender.

Christian Verreault's signature doubles as both authorization and the entire governance structure of this note. La Baie, formerly Grande-Baie, sits on the Saguenay — a region where francophone small-business scrip persisted well into the late twentieth century.