The 1935 issue is the only series the Bank of Canada ever printed in two separate unilingual versions - English notes under serial prefix A for most of the country, French notes under prefix F, mostly distributed through Montreal. It lasted two years. In May 1935 deputy governor John Osborne wrote to a colleague that the English-speaking population was inclined to mutilate the French notes while the French population complained it could not get enough of them, and the Bank of Canada Act settled the matter: from 1937, every Canadian note would be bilingual.
That makes every prefix-F note a fossil of a two-year experiment, and the French dollar is the affordable way to own one - 15,196,000 printed against just over sixty million English dollars across both series. Same George V portrait, same green, same Osborne-Towers signatures; only the language, and the history, differ.
The entry ticket to the French series. Every denomination above it gets scarcer and dearer in French, so the un dollar is where a collector learns the prefix-F market before the fifties and hundreds ask real money. The premium over the English note is the price of the story, and it is a good story.
Mintage figures: United States Mint (Annual Report of the Director of the Mint), Royal Canadian Mint records, and — for the 1935 banknote issue — Bank of Canada printage records as published in the Charlton Standard Catalogue of Canadian Government Paper Money, cross-checked across independent published references. Specifications: United States Mint coin specifications.