In the West, $2 bills are funny money

But nobody’s laughing. Even some bankers shun them as “bad luck"

EVEN THE Bank of Canada, which issues our currency, can’t say why — but people on the Prairies don’t like the two-dollar bill. They say it’s unlucky. In Toronto, Montreal, Halifax or anywhere east of Manitoba, banks use one two-dollar bill for every two one-dollar bills. In British Columbia the ratio is one to one.

But in Regina, the Bank of Canada issues about one two-dollar bill for every 400 one-dollar bills in circulation. The situation is about the same in Winnipeg, Saskatoon, Calgary and Edmonton.

In Regina a few years ago the Interprovincial Steel and Pipe Corporation Ltd. wanted to make the city aware of the value of its payroll to local commerce. To do so one week, it paid its employees with two-dollar bills — because the sudden flood of the rarely seen banknote would bring home to tradesmen just how important IPSCO was to the local economy.

In Calgary, a bank teller says that on the rare occasions they try to give a customer a two-dollar bill, it’s usually refused. The local office of the Bank of Canada receives daily orders for banknotes of all denominations — but only about a dozen times a year do they get requests for two-dollar bills. And that’s usually in May, during local horserace week: two dollars is the most common pari-mutuel bet.

Even people who regard the twodollar bill as bad luck don’t know why. Bankers, however, offer four tentative explanations.

One is that two is also “deuce” — and the word “deuce” is a common synonym for the Devil. Another is that the sum of two dollars is com-

monly associated with racetrack betting — and a few years ago, when frontier puritanism was at its most powerful, race tracks were considered sinful, unlucky places.

A third explanation, quoted often by Bank of Canada officials, is that in the late 1920s and early 1930s one printing of Canadian two-dollar bills bore a picture of the Prince of Wales, now the Duke of Windsor. At that time he was an adventurous young man, prone to falling from his horse and injuring himself. These accidents were widely reported and people began to consider it unlucky to have anything to do with the Prince of Wales — or notes bearing his portrait.

The fourth, and most plausible, explanation, is that the superstition was imported from the U. S. where, at the turn of the century, twoand five-dollar bills were so similar in design that people would often accept the two thinking it was the five. Whatever the validity of this explanation, the U. S. stopped printing two-dollar bills several years ago. There was, they said, no demand for them.

In Winnipeg, a senior official of one of the chartered banks still snips off the corner of every two-dollar bill that comes into his hands because, he says somewhat shamefacedly, “it’s supposed to make the bad luck harmless.” But he doesn’t know why the twodollar bill is bad luck in the first place.

“We can’t explain it, and neither can most of the prairie people who hold the belief,” say officials in the Bank of Canada’s currency division. “But then neither can we explain why people in Vancouver use more twodollar bills than other parts of the country.” ALAN EDMONDS