5 Dollars

Barclays Bank (Canada) was a short-lived subsidiary of Barclays Bank PLC, established to serve British commercial interests in Canada. It never built a significant retail branch network and issued notes for only a brief window before Canadian banking consolidation made private chartered bank currency effectively obsolete — the Bank of Canada Act of 1934 transferred the monopoly on note issue to the new central bank, with chartered banks given a decade-long phase-out period.

This 1935 note is therefore among the last chartered bank issues in Canadian history, printed by the Canadian Bank Note Company in Ottawa during a transition that rendered the entire series largely redundant before it could circulate meaningfully. Surviving examples are scarce relative to other chartered bank issues precisely because so few entered active use.