Canada Had No Bank of Its Own Until 1817 — What Did People Use for Money?

Subscribe to the channel    / @dominionnotes   In 1685, the soldiers of New France were paid with playing cards. They were signed by the colony's officials and declared to be money, because the ship carrying their wages hadn't arrived. That was only the first strange answer to a simple question: with no bank anywhere in the country, what did Canadians actually use for money? The story runs through beaver pelts priced by the Hudson's Bay Company, and Spanish silver dollars worth five shillings in one colony and eight in the next. It includes farmers who settled a whole year's debts in wheat, a Quebec warehouse the locals nicknamed the Swindler, and a War of 1812 banknote that paid you interest every single day. Then, in 1817, a group of Montreal merchants opened the country's first bank, which became the Bank of Montreal, in a rented room on Rue Saint-Paul. The blueprint they built it from came from the last place most Canadians would guess. If you have a chequing account or a bank card today, this is where the system behind them began. If this changed how you think about the money in your wallet, there's a whole ledger of stories like it. Subscribe to The Canadian Ledger as we uncover how the financial systems modern Canada takes for granted were actually built. #CanadianHistory #HistoryOfMoney #CanadianBanking