Can someone explain why so many canadian silver dollars appear to be proof like? Did they have any uncirculated coins that were not PL? Not to change topic also but does someone have photos showing the difference between large and small beads. Maybe a link to a web site would work also.
Tater, I can't help you with the first question, but here are some pictures you asked for. http://personal.telefonica.terra.es/web/vr/canada/en/v1965.htm
The large beads is the toughest, and I feel the medium beads is just a scam to get people to spend more money, In order of scarcity: SB, P5 SB, B5 LB, B5 LB, P5
Canadian coins were minted that aren't prooflike, but in general prooflike coins are much more common in uncirculated grades than business strikes are. That is likely what accounts for difference in availability.
But why, is it the way the Canadian Mint chose to design their coins or some other reason? Just curious what you guys have heard. Is it more expensive to produce a proof like planchet?
Just imagine the PL sets as if they're U.S. proof sets. Hundreds of thousands of PL sets were sold to collectors both in Canada and the United States. In those days, most collectors would be happy owning just one example of each denomination for each year. They would buy the PL set, and then not even worry about picking lesser coins from bank rolls or pocket change. Add that to the fact that dollar coins weren't really very popular in Canada either, and you have your answer. We didn't have a dollar coin from 1935 to 1971, so this didn't happen in the U.S. The number of proof sets minted in the early days (1936, for instance) are far outnumbered by the amount of coins saved from pocket change, so the proof half dollar would be worth more than the uncirculated (unless the uncirculated was MS69 or something). In Canada, it was just the opposite.
