Now there's a new incentive to part with the high-value cash: Canadians could find they're sitting on stacks of useless currency if they put off exchanging it at a bank. The Bank of Canada has struggled to eliminate the bill. There were one million of the bills still in circulation in , a number that has dropped by just , in the twelve years since, according to the latest information available from the bank.
Tasker is a senior writer in the CBC's parliamentary bureau in Ottawa. He can be reached at john. Pseudonyms will no longer be permitted. By submitting a comment, you accept that CBC has the right to reproduce and publish that comment in whole or in part, in any manner CBC chooses.
Please note that CBC does not endorse the opinions expressed in comments. Comments on this story are moderated according to our Submission Guidelines. Money-laundering experts believe most of the missing bills continue to circulate among criminal elites who use them to pay large debts, with the recipient, in turn, using them to pay their own debts with only a portion of the notes bleeding off into the legitimate banking system. The notes were retired as part of the fight against organized crime at the recommendation of the RCMP, said Jeremy Harrison, spokesman for the Bank of Canada.
High-denomination bank notes are popular with high-end criminals because it makes moving large amounts of cash so much easier. Every Canadian bank note weighs the same — one gram — and for cash deals as big as those done by drug rings, payment can require a duffle bag. In the s, the Caruana Mafia clan in Montreal was depositing so much money that they backed a pickup truck up to the doors of a Montreal bank and tossed out hockey bags stuffed with cash.
When the notes were first withdrawn, 2,, of them were circulating, according to Bank of Canada statistics. Some of them will be in safety deposit boxes or similarly hidden, kept as liquid assets.
Others will remain in the hands of collectors who like to hoard bills that might become rare, financial experts say. But few doubt that the majority of the remaining bills continue to fuel the drug trade as the highest denomination legal tender in the Western world.
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Sign up to receive the daily top stories from the National Post, a division of Postmedia Network Inc. Essentially, you may no longer be able to spend them in a cash transaction. This does not mean that the notes are worthless.
The Bank of Canada will continue to honour them at face value. Amendments to the Bank of Canada Act and the Currency Act approved by Parliament in gave the Government of Canada the power to remove legal tender status from bank notes—something it could not do before.
The Minister of Finance is responsible for both the Bank of Canada Act and the Currency Act , and the changes made to allow the removal of legal tender status from bank notes were initiated by the Minister in consultation with the Bank of Canada and other agencies. The Bank fully supports the amendments.
Having the power to remove legal tender status from bank notes is a way to complete their removal from circulation and to help ensure that Canadians have access to the most current and secure bank notes.
It also guarantees they are always easy to spend since recent notes are more recognizable to merchants. It will be able to remove other notes in the future as needed. Many other countries officially remove old notes from circulation. More than 20 central banks around the world have the power to remove legal tender status from their notes.
These include:. Some central banks demonetize bank notes after legal tender status has been removed, which means that they cease to honour their face value. In other words, demonetized bank notes lose their value. You can take them to your financial institution or send them to the Bank of Canada to redeem them.
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