This is the scarcest thing the Bank of Canada put into circulation in the 1950s, and almost nobody knew it at the time. The 1954 series introduced the asterisk replacement note: instead of hand-matching serial numbers when a sheet was spoiled, the Bank kept stocks of independently numbered notes with a small ✽ printed before the serial, and swapped them in. The scheme was worked out in 1953 and debuted with this series, on the $1 through $20 only.
The devil's face printing window then did the rest. The $5 was a British American Bank Note denomination, its replacement stock was barely started when the signatures changed, and the Coyne-Towers ✽A/C block stopped at 2,400 notes. On a site that records printages from 460,000,000 down, only the 880 proof Morgans of 1895 sit below that figure. Every other note and coin in this record, including the fifteen-thousand-note 1937 $1,000, is more common than this five-dollar bill.
Survival makes it harder still. Replacement notes went out as ordinary money, nobody set them aside in 1954, and the variety was only catalogued years later, when most of the 2,400 had already died in wallets.
The asterisk is the entire variety, and it is one small printed mark on a note that is otherwise identical to a common one. That is exactly the shape of rarity that attracts manufacturing. Treat any raw example as a question, not an answer.
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.