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In late April of 2015, the National Currency Collection finally succeeded in acquiring a Spanish gold cob—famous in legends and tales of pirates and their buried treasures!

Every prop in the holiday drama generally has some sort of symbolic meaning—evergreen trees: life in the dead of winter, holly: Christ’s crown of thorns, the dreidel: Jewish resistance to oppression. Money, on the other hand, only seems to symbolize itself.

Do you notice anything peculiar about this bank note? It’s blue; it’s denominated as 5-dollar; it has handsome portraits of Sir Wilfred Laurier on it…hold on a minute!

Nova Scotia has long been a centre of trade that connected Europe, New England and the West Indies. Following the American Revolution, Halifax became the primary British port in North America and a hub of financial activity.

Before banks were established in remote regions of Canada, paying employees involved shipping currency long distances into wild and often lawless locations. The alternative to this risky enterprise was for the company to issue its own money. Called scrip…

It’s a historic day for us as well. It isn’t every day that the Bank of Canada introduces a new commemorative note.

This note was issued on 9 September 2015 to honour Queen Elizabeth II as the longest-reigning sovereign in Canada’s modern era.

This special note was issued in 1967 to celebrate the centennial of Canadian Confederation. It is a variant of the $1 bill from the Canadian Landscape series of 1954.

During 1952, Comfort produced a number of pencil and watercolour design models for the face of the new notes. Some were updates of the traditional style while others were radically modern treatments.

In exchange for pizza and a day out of the office, several Bank employees were persuaded to dress up in period costumes and re-enact three key moments from the history of this shady “bank”.