5 Dollars

The Imperial Bank of Canada was absorbed into the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce in 1961, but in 1933 it was still operating as a fully independent chartered bank — one of the last years any Canadian chartered bank could legally issue its own currency. The Bank of Canada Act of 1934 began the process of centralizing note issue, and by 1944 chartered bank circulation was effectively finished. Notes from this final decade of private bank issue are accordingly scarce in higher grades, partly because the transition gave banks little incentive to maintain careful inventory of their own retiring paper.

The Canadian Bank Note Company printed the bulk of late-era chartered bank issues from Ottawa, and the workmanship on this series is consistent with their high intaglio standards of the period.