5 Dollars

The Bank of Montreal was Canada's oldest chartered bank, and by 1931 it still issued its own notes — a practice that would end definitively only with the Bank of Canada Act of 1934, which gave the new central bank a monopoly on domestic currency issuance. This note belongs to the last generation of Canadian chartered bank issues, printed in the teeth of the Depression at a moment when public confidence in private bank paper was already eroding.

The Canadian Bank Note Company in Ottawa had by this point become the dominant supplier to chartered banks across the country, having absorbed much of the market from earlier competitors. Series P#S553 is a chartered bank issue, not a government obligation — a legal distinction that mattered enormously to holders if the issuing institution failed.