Banknote History

History of Canadian Banknotes: Chartered Banks, the 1935 Bank of Canada, and the Polymer Frontier Series

For most of its history Canada had no single issuer. Army bills paid the troops in 1813, the Dominion printed 25-cent shinplasters, and dozens of private banks put their own designs in circulation until 1944. The Bank of Canada opened in 1935 and has issued eight series since.

Army bills, 1813 Dominion Notes Act, 1868 Bank of Canada opened 11 March 1935 Eight series to date

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Last updated: September 2026

What money did Canada use before the Bank of Canada?

Colonial treasury notes, army bills, Dominion government notes and the notes of private chartered banks, all at once. Paper money earned its reputation in Canada during the War of 1812, when Lower Canada issued army bills that were later redeemed in full. After Confederation the Dominion took over the provincial issues, while chartered banks kept printing their own designs.

James Powell's A History of the Canadian Dollar, published by the Bank of Canada, records that the initial army bill issue was £250,000, denominated in dollars, by the government of Lower Canada, and that later issues raised the total outstanding to £1.5 million. Bills of $25 or more earned interest. By 1816, after the war ended, all of them had been redeemed in full, which restored trust in paper money in Upper and Lower Canada after the bad experience of over-issued colonial bills of credit (Bank of Canada). Other colonies ran parallel experiments: the Island of St. John, now Prince Edward Island, issued £500 of treasury notes as early as 1790.

The Dominion Notes Act came into force the year after Confederation and made Dominion notes out of the provincial notes of the Province of Canada, redeemable in Halifax and Saint John as well as Montreal and Toronto, and it was later extended to Prince Edward Island, Manitoba, British Columbia and the Northwest Territories. The Uniform Currency Act of April 1871 then fixed the denominations of Canadian currency as dollars, cents and mills, a mill being one tenth of a cent.

The most charming survivor of that era is the 25-cent fractional note of 1870, the shinplaster. It was issued as a temporary measure, at the prompting of William Weir, to help drive depreciated American silver coin out of Canadian circulation before the Dominion had coinage of its own. It proved popular and kept circulating until the end of the century. The nickname dates to the American Revolution, when soldiers reputedly used discounted Continental notes as insulation or dressings for wounds.

Why was the Bank of Canada created?

Because the Depression exposed a country running monetary policy without a central bank. A Royal Commission chaired by Lord Macmillan reported in 1933 in favour of one, the Bank of Canada Act received royal assent on 3 July 1934, and the Bank officially started operations on 11 March 1935.

Its first Governor was Graham Towers, who came from the Royal Bank of Canada, where he had been assistant general manager. To supply practical central banking experience the Bank appointed J. A. C. Osborne, a former secretary of the Bank of England, as Deputy Governor. On the day the Bank opened, the Dominion Notes Act and the Finance Act were repealed, and Dominion notes were quickly replaced by Bank of Canada notes (Bank of Canada).

One detail surprises most people: the Bank of Canada began life as a privately owned institution, with shares that had to be widely held and no individual permitted to own more than fifty. Mackenzie King's government took control through a second share issue in 1936 and nationalised the Bank in 1938.

What was on the 1935 first series?

The British royal family, almost entirely. The Bank issued its first series on 11 March 1935, the day it opened, and it was really two issues because separate French and English versions of every denomination were produced, the only time that happened. Seven members of King George V's family appear across the denominations, with prime ministers on the two highest.

The line-up reads like a family album: George V on the $1, Queen Mary on the $2, Edward, Prince of Wales on the $5, Princess Mary on the $10, an eight-year-old Princess Elizabeth on the $20, Prince Albert, Duke of York, the future George VI, on the $50, and Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester, on the $100. Sir John A. Macdonald is on the $500 and Sir Wilfrid Laurier on the $1,000. The reverses carry allegorical figures for agriculture, transport, electric power, harvest, radio, industry and fertility (Bank of Canada Museum).

The Bank did not design these notes itself. They were the work of two security printers, the British American Bank Note Company and the Canadian Bank Note Company, working with the federal government, and the Museum is blunt that the result looked nineteenth century even in 1935: numbers, rosettes, frames and some vignettes came straight out of the printers' pattern books. The Museum's record for the $1 names Robert Savage of the American Bank Note Company as the engraver of the King's portrait, worked from a photograph supplied by Lafayette Ltd of London, gives the dimensions as 15.1 by 7.3 cm, and lists the signatures of Deputy Governor J. A. C. Osborne and Governor Graham F. Towers, with a last day of issue of 2 January 1937 (Bank of Canada Museum). Two denominations were unique to the series: the $500, and the $25 commemorative for the silver jubilee of George V and Queen Mary, whose reverse view of Windsor Castle is the only image from outside Canada used on Canadian government money.

Why did Canada redesign its notes in 1937?

Because the monarch changed twice in a year. George V died in 1936 and his son Edward VIII abdicated, which forced a redesign. The government used the moment to amend the Bank of Canada Act so that all future notes would be bilingual, thirty years before the Official Languages Act, and the change prompted bitter debate in the House of Commons.

Bilingual wording drove the whole layout. Portraits moved to the centre, which made a symmetrical design possible, the denominations became more uniform, and each one took a distinct colour, the scheme Canadians still recognise. King George VI appears on every denomination except the $100 and $1,000, which carry Sir John A. Macdonald and Sir Wilfrid Laurier. The Museum notes that the George VI portrait used across the series had already appeared on the 1935 $50, when he was Duke of York. Security features were unchanged: extensive intaglio printing on both sides and green planchette dots scattered through the paper (Bank of Canada Museum).

The Museum's record for the Bilingual $1 gives a date of issue of 19 July 1937, a last day of issue of 31 December 1954, dimensions of 15.2 by 7.2 cm, and three signature combinations under Governor Graham F. Towers with Deputy Governors J. A. C. Osborne, Donald Gordon and James E. Coyne (Bank of Canada Museum). The $1,000 was printed with the rest of the series but held back from circulation for several years, which is why it is scarce in any grade.

What made the 1954 Canadian Landscape series different?

It was the first Bank of Canada series shaped by one designer. In the early 1950s the Bank hired the Canadian artist Charles Comfort, and for the first time a single lead designer shaped an entire series rather than a printing company's catalogue. No prime ministers appear; every denomination carries Queen Elizabeth II.

The brief was unusual and specific. Bank officials wanted Canadian landscapes showing little or no sign of human activity, and the eight final images were chosen from more than 3,000 photographs held by railways, archives and news agencies. The result is a portrait of the country by way of its emptiness: the Saskatchewan prairie on the $1, the Saint-Francois River valley in Quebec on the $2, Otter Falls near the Alaska Highway on the $5, Mount Burgess in Yoho National Park on the $10, the Laurentians on the $20, Crescent Beach at Lockeport in Nova Scotia on the $50, Okanagan Lake on the $100 and L'Anse-Saint-Jean on the Saguenay fjord on the $1,000. Design changes included moving the portrait to the right, simplifying the line work and folding the coat of arms into the background, and the series brought the first use of lithography on a Bank of Canada note, which added a third colour (Bank of Canada Museum).

Then came the accident that made the series famous. The first printings are the Devil's Head notes, so called because highlights in the curls behind the Queen's ear read to some people as a horned face. The portrait was engraved faithfully from a Yousuf Karsh photograph, so nothing was intended; the engraving was modified in June 1956. The Museum's record for the $1 gives a date of issue of 9 September 1954, the modification in June 1956, a last day of issue of 2 June 1974, and dimensions of 15.2 by 7 cm, under Governors Graham F. Towers, James E. Coyne, Louis Rasminsky and Gerald K. Bouey. Because the modification ran through every denomination, each one exists in both forms, which is what makes the variety such a satisfying set to build.

How did Canadian note design change after 1969?

Each of the next three series answered a new counterfeiting technology. Scenes of Canada replied to better colour printing, Birds of Canada to the colour photocopier, and the Canadian Journey series to affordable digital reproduction. Along the way the notes stopped promising to pay and started simply declaring their value.

Scenes of Canada, issued between 1969 and 1979, is the only Bank of Canada series developed through an international design competition. Bank staff called it the multicoloured series because two or more accent colours fade through each note, and the guilloche edge patterns were updated versions of the machine-turned designs on older currency. It was also the first Canadian series to read this note is legal tender rather than will pay to the bearer on demand. Finance minister Edgar Benson chose to feature Canadian prime ministers across most of the series, and that set the portrait theme for every series until the vertical notes. The $1 issued in June 1974 was the last $1 note the Bank ever issued, and the $2 of August 1975 shows an Inuit hunting scene based on a photograph taken by Doug Wilkinson at Pond Inlet on North Baffin Island (Bank of Canada Museum).

The Birds of Canada series of 1986 is the transitional one. It kept the traditional features but added something beyond paper and printing: a reflective patch that shifted colour when tilted but read as one dark colour to a scanner, among the first optical security devices on any banknote series. The designers went deliberately open and simple so that the flaws in scanned copies would show, and the word Canada in the sky behind the birds, which looks like flat tint, is in fact microprinted parallel lines that break into moire patterns when digitally scanned. This was also the series that said goodbye to the $1,000 and the $2 (Bank of Canada Museum).

The Canadian Journey series of 2001 to 2006 was the first Canadian series designed wholly on computers, a strategy the Bank adopted in 2002, and one person executed the overall designs: Canadian Bank Note Company art director Jorge Peral. It was also the first series to involve Canadian citizens in choosing the themes, through focus groups that picked out the arts, winter, women's suffrage and other elements for the reverses. The defences moved from the intricacy of the engraving to applied features: metal threads, holograms, ghost images, puzzle numbers, shifting metallic stripes and hidden ultraviolet detail, plus braille-like raised dots along the top right edge for visually impaired users. The $20, $50 and $100 arrived in 2004, and the $5 and $10 were upgraded in 2005 and 2006 so that all five denominations shared the same suite (Bank of Canada Museum).

Canadian banknote series at a glance

The table below gives every Bank of Canada series with its denominations, the size the Museum or the Bank publishes, the substrate and the variety collectors chase. Sizes for the earlier series come from the Museum's record for the denomination named in the cell.

Series, denominations and dimensions from the Bank of Canada Museum's complete bank note series and the Bank of Canada's rules on reproducing banknote images, read in September 2026. For sizes beside other countries, see the banknote sizes chart.

When did Canada move to polymer and vertical notes?

Canada issued its first polymer notes in the Frontiers series between 2011 and 2013, and its first vertical note, the Viola Desmond $10, on 19 November 2018. Every circulating Canadian note is now polymer and measures 152.4 by 69.85 mm, or 6.0 by 2.75 inches, whatever its denomination.

The Bank of Canada publishes that figure in its rules for reproducing banknote images, which require a physical reproduction to be either less than three quarters or more than one and a half times the size of a genuine note (Bank of Canada). The substrate was chosen as a security feature in its own right, since unusual or expensive material is hard for a counterfeiter to source, and it also lasts about two and a half times longer than paper. The Frontiers themes moved away from landscape and portrait convention toward technical achievement: the transcontinental railway, the Canadarm and the International Space Station, Arctic research, medical science and the Vimy Memorial. The comparison of polymer and paper banknotes covers what that means for storage and grading.

The vertical series broke the format itself. The Bank issued the $10 in Winnipeg on 19 November 2018, at a ceremony in the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, the building shown on the back of the note. Governor Stephen S. Poloz and Wanda Robson, Viola Desmond's sister, spoke there and spent the first notes in the building itself. Desmond, a Nova Scotia businesswoman, refused to leave a whites-only area of a movie theatre in 1946, and the note also carries a map of the historic North End of Halifax where she lived and worked (Bank of Canada).

The second vertical note was unveiled in Ottawa on 3 September 2026: a $20 carrying a portrait of King Charles III, Canada's first note to show His Majesty and the first time in more than seventy years that a new monarch has appeared on the $20. Governor Tiff Macklem presented it alongside the Governor General, Louise Arbour. The portrait sits in a floral and leafy tapestry, the floral emblems of all thirteen provinces and territories appear on the front, and a circular window designed with the Bank's Indigenous Advisory Circle shows plants culturally significant to Indigenous Peoples in Canada. The Vimy Memorial stays on the back, and the note enters circulation in late February 2027 (Bank of Canada). A vertical $5 featuring Terry Fox was announced on 16 December 2024 (Bank of Canada Museum). For grading, values and how to start a Canadian set, see the Canada banknotes guide.

Which Canadian denominations have disappeared?

Five. The $1 stopped being issued in 1989 and the $2 in 1996, both replaced by coins; the $1,000 stopped in 2000; and the $25 and $500 were discontinued shortly after they were issued in 1935. From 1 January 2021 those five denominations from every Bank of Canada series are no longer accepted in transactions, though the Bank of Canada continues to honour them at face value.

Parliament amended the Bank of Canada Act and the Currency Act in 2018 to give the Government of Canada that power, which it had not previously had, and the Minister of Finance initiated the change in consultation with the Bank. The Bank's own explanation is practical: the five notes had not been produced in decades, and taking them out of circulation helps keep the notes in people's hands recent and recognisable. The government says it has no current plans to do the same to any other denomination (Bank of Canada). For a collector the practical advice is the same as ever: have older notes assessed before redeeming them, because condition and variety often carry a premium far above face value.

Canada has also issued four commemorative notes since 1935, and they are spread far enough apart to work as a short history of Canadian design on their own. The 1935 $25 marked the silver jubilee of George V in the Victorian idiom of its day. A commemorative $1 marked the Centennial in 1967, with the Centre Block of the original 1862 Parliament buildings on the reverse. A $20 issued on 9 September 2015 honoured Queen Elizabeth II as the longest-reigning sovereign in Canada's modern era, using Frontiers security technology. A Canada 150 note unveiled on 7 April 2017 was the first Bank of Canada note to carry four portraits on the front: Sir John A. Macdonald, Sir George-Étienne Cartier, Agnes Macphail and James Gladstone, all parliamentarians (Bank of Canada Museum). Set beside the vertical $10, they show a country that spent ninety years putting royalty and prime ministers on its money and then put a civil rights figure there instead.

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