Although so few of us deal in checks these days, here's my old practice: Bank of Montreal maintained a bank account in New York from which they wrote money orders in American funds. My banks never had a problem with these - they were American checks in American dollars with American routing numbers, even though the sender had "Montreal" in its name. I'll bet with the internationalization of Canadian banks, RBC and TD offer this as well (I know they have American branch operations as far south as Florida).