1 Cent - C. Verreault Petroleum La Baie, Quebec

A Quebec merchant scrip note, issued by a regional petroleum retailer rather than any banking authority. These privately printed trade tokens — circulated as change substitutes or loyalty instruments by small businesses — proliferated in mid-twentieth-century Quebec, particularly in communities where coin shortages or local commercial custom made them practical. L'imprimeur inc. was a Quebec job printer, not a security press, which is exactly what you'd expect for this kind of hyper-local issue.

The Verreault name is well-documented in the Saguenay–Lac-Saint-Jean commercial registry. La Baie, formerly Port-Alfred, was a working-class industrial town — not a typical market for numismatic curiosity, which makes surviving examples rarer than their humble face value implies.