50 Dollars

The Birds of Canada series, to which this note belongs, was the first Canadian series to incorporate a metallic security thread — a direct response to increasingly sophisticated counterfeiting that had plagued the earlier Scenes of Canada issues throughout the 1970s and 1980s. The RCMP had flagged the vulnerability well before the new series launched.

Hipschen's engraving work for the Canadian Bank Note Company during this period was among the finest intaglio produced domestically. The $50 denomination in this series carries two distinct signature combinations across its print run, spanning twelve years of issue — longer than most comparable Canadian series remained in production without a redesign.