OK, I have not made this as clear as I ought. I will use the example given above of the V/S and *V/S $5's to illustrate. First, I have already attempted to make the point that a sequence of numbers was not taken out of the V/S series to number the *V/S replacement notes; the latter is a separate series with its own set of serial numbers.
What perhaps is not as clear as it needs to be, is that *V/S $5's could be used to replace defective, numbered notes in ANY prefix series of the same type - they did not all have to be used in the V/S series.
That is not to say that all 10,000,000 V/S $5's made it through production without any mishaps, obviously. Just using the catalogue numbers (page 219) for all the Beattie-Rasminsky $5's, I calculate that approximately three-tenths of one percent had to be replaced. (This is probably a maximum figure since there may be, within the more extensive replacement series, lower and upper ranges - with unused numerical gaps in between, resulting from block numbering - that we do not yet know about.)
There seems to be no reason to suppose that one prefix would be greatly more accident prone than another, over the long haul of printing ten million notes, so it might not be too unreasonable to assume that 0.3 of one percent of every series, more or less, had to be replaced. Thus instead of a 10,000,000 production for each prefix series, an issue of 9,970,000 might be a closer number, taken as an average.
Finally, I am convinced that if the Bank of Canada paid for ten million notes, they received ten million notes, so no big accounting debacle seems likely.
Are we on the same wave-length yet?
