1912 Boc $5 Dilemma

Purelywasted, interesting is that by Collector67's photo of the COA that The Royal Mint (England) was selling the Canadian gold hoard coins, as well as the Royal Canadian Mint. (I'm assuming RCM's COA was issued by RCM.). That's something I certainly wasn't aware of. Was anyone?

Odd though, those stats don't quite support RCM's statement "the Government of Canada recovered the majority of circulating $5 and $10 coins and withheld remaining stocks from circulation.......".

https://goccf.com/t/134544&whichpage=183

Just doing a little research...of interest from what I gather from various sources it appears at the time WW1 broke out in 1914 Canada, it eliminated the requirement of a " gold standard" meaning up until then banks were required to balance credit granted with holdings of gold reserves to safeguard against insolvency. It makes sense to me that banks' gold reserves were the gold coins There was not yet a Central Bank and why various banks still printed their own money during that same period of time (banknotes issued by banks would also be considered "credit" because the bank would be required to redeem them). While $5 and $10 seems like peanuts, back then 1912-1914 gold coins were never really circulated in the form of circulated coin, in the way we'd think of today. Rather it appears it was a simplified method of assigning a value as opposed to raw nuggets.

At that point in 1914, the government gave an alternative to banks, that of buying Dominion of Canada notes instead of holding gold. It was suggested this was done to prevent bank panic by enabling banks to lend more money, particularly to support wartime efforts. This meant that gold(coins) were essentially freed-up and I'd expect much of it quickly flowed out of the country, particularly to elsewhere where gold reserve requirements remained in place - especially if the value of the gold coins exceeded f/v.

In support of this, reading between the lines I can't help but wonder that Canada was considered a minor player as we were but a colony within the British Commonwealth, yet we had valuable gold resources. As I recall WW1 began high German inflation because their currency was not adequately backed by gold, therefore adequate gold holdings would have been important to, for example "our mother country". So if my sources are reliable and my interpretation correct, I'd expect a sizeable amount of Cdn gold coins got melted after leaving our borders.