These Spanish dollars were accommodated into a £sd account system, by setting a valuation for these coins in terms of a pound unit.

The York rating of one Spanish dollar being to eight shillings was officially used in Upper Canada until it was outlawed in 1796, but continued to be used unofficially well into the early 19th century.

In 1825, an Imperial Order-in-Council was made for the purposes of causing sterling coinage to circulate in the British colonies.

Remedial legislation was introduced in 1838 but it was not applied to the British North American colonies due to recent uprisings in Upper and Lower Canada.

Local traders, for reasons of practicality in relation to the increasing trade with the neighbouring United States, had an overwhelming desire to assimilate the Canadian currency with the American unit, but the imperial authorities in London still preferred the idea of sterling to be the sole currency throughout the British Empire.

In 1851, the Canadian parliament passed an act for the purposes of introducing an £sd unit in conjunction with decimal fractional coinage.

The idea was that the decimal coins would correspond to exact amounts in relation to the US dollar fractional coinage.

The authorities in London refused to give consent to the act on technical grounds, hoping that an £sd currency would be chosen instead.

This contrived mix of decimal and Sterling currency was abandoned and an 1853 act of the Legislative Assembly introduced the gold standard into Canada, with pounds, shilling, pence, dollars and cents all legal for keeping government accounts.

In 1857 the Currency Act was amended, abolishing accounts in pounds and the use of sterling coinage as legal tender.