It was carted around in armoured trucks, protected by gun-toting security guards and secured with alarms and cameras. It was accepted at par with the Canadian dollar at bars and car dealerships and jewelry stores across the country. It became so universal that lawyers worried it would be confused with actual Canadian currency.
For more than 60 years, Canadian Tire money staked a legitimate claim as Canada’s unofficial second currency. At one point, a study showed half the country collected it. The coupons even made the Canadian Oxford dictionary.
Then, five years ago, as the pandemic began and the world fell apart, physical Canadian Tire money disappeared. No eulogy, no tearful goodbye, no 21-gun salute or playing of “Taps.” Just a quiet fade into memory for one of the most successful loyalty programs in Canadian history.
Ultimately, experts speculate, Canadian Tire money fell victim to a world moving faster and smarter than ever. The coupon return on a purchase, once five per cent, depreciated to 0.4 per cent by the 2010s. Cash, at Canadian Tire and everywhere else, fell out of favour. And a digital rewards program gave the company an asset even more valuable than loyalty: data, on what and when and how often you buy.
Its history, from lawsuits to armoured vans to international fraud, is as wild as how ubiquitous it once was. It all began in 1958 with war.
A Toronto gas war
They had tried to avoid it. Canadian Tire began selling gas in 1958 outside its Yonge Street and Davenport Road store and made a point of not antagonizing the competition by undercutting their prices. Instead, to gain an edge, co-founder A.J. Billes and his wife Muriel devised a plan to give customers five per cent of their purchase back in the form of coupons.
Thus, according to Daniel Stoffman’s 2012 book “Living The Canadian Dream,” Canadian Tire money was born.
The competition got mad anyway. And by 1960, the oil companies were slashing prices to get customers back.
“It was a gas war,” Martha Billes, daughter of A.J. and now a Canadian Tire board member, told Stoffman. “The big guys filled the city with cheap gas and pushed the price down and down. They were quite determined to put us out of business.”
At its height, the gas war was bleeding Canadian Tire dry, costing just one station $25,000 a week, according to Stoffman. And in June 1960, the oil companies stopped selling gas to Canadian Tire altogether — prompting Billes to buy 60 million gallons from the Soviet Union just two years before the Cuban missile crisis.
In the end, Canadian Tire won out. Within two years, the company’s five Toronto gas stations — making up only 0.4 per cent of stations in the city — were pumping a whopping five per cent of gas sold, the Star reported at the time. The gas companies conceded Canadian Tire stations were not going away. The coupons made sure of that.
Canadian Tire money was soon introduced in stores. The same companies that printed money for the Bank of Canada began printing coupons for Canadian Tire. As the program grew, so too did its impact.
“It was a big part of history,” said Nada Elnahla, a professor at Maynooth University in Ireland who has researched Canadian Tire money, “not just as a loyalty program but elsewhere as a part of the culture.”
A cultural phenomenon
By the 1980s, even rivals were cashing in. Rona, the home improvement chain, ran an entire advertising campaign around accepting Canadian Tire money. Canadian Tire took Rona to court, arguing the coupons were its property. Canadian Tire lost.
Over the years, stores across the country happily took the coupons. A hotel on Queen Street West, an arcade in Ottawa, a car dealership in Waterloo, a jewelry store in Oakville, a video rental store in Halifax — in 2009, at the Thunder Bay humane society, a dog could be adopted with Canadian Tire money.
At one point, an Ottawa restaurant stopped accepting it. “Too many people came in with it,” the manager said in 1991, “and there’s only so much you can buy at Canadian Tire.”
Customers made substantial purchases with nothing but coupons. In July 2011, an Edmonton man spent $1,050.05 in store money, saved up over 15 years, to buy a 13.5-horsepower riding mower. Jerome Fourre, a Quebec director of the Canadian Tire Coupon Collectors Club — yes, that is a real thing, founded in 1990 in Toronto — said he spent $2,400 in Canadian Tire money for a snowblower.
“The girl at the cash almost had a nervous breakdown,” he said.
And then there’s Corin Raymond. In 2012, after writing a song about Canadian Tire money, the tousled, bearded folk singer began collecting the funds on a cross-country tour. Then he posted a plea to Facebook, then launched a website. The money came pouring in.
“Every day these stuffed envelopes arrive,” Raymond told the Star. “The mailman must think I’m the Godfather.”
His final tally: 32,000 bills weighing 27 kilograms and worth around $6,200. He put it all to use at a Toronto recording studio that accepted the coupons at par with the Canadian dollar. On the final product, three tracks from the end, Raymond sings “Don’t Spend It Honey.” He is, of course, singing about Canadian Tire money.
International mystique
The money popped up outside Canada. Sometime in the 1980s, a Star reporter wandering a Jamaican beach stumbled upon a booth accepting Canadian Tire money. The vendor sent the money to a relative in Toronto, the reporter recalled, who bought tools and shipped them back to the island.
So convincing were the notes — complete with anti-counterfeit measures, including a maple leaf that appears when the bill was held just right — some foreigners believed it was real cash. Members of the Armed Forces stationed abroad would often pass the coupons off as Canadian currency, a forces spokesperson confirmed in 1988. A 1980s conman transported huge amounts of Canadian Tire money to Belgium, where he convinced locals it was real currency and pawned it off at bargain prices.
An even more astounding, if likely apocryphal story dates back to the mid-1990s. A German man, the story goes, forged $11 million in fake Canadian Tire money and planned a massive spending spree in Canada. He was arrested before he could ever make it across the Atlantic. But the Star could not confirm the veracity of the story.
For one reason or another, Canadian Tire money came to be protected with banklike security. Gun-toting security guards carried shipments of fresh notes from armoured cars into vaults at a “top-security location in midtown Toronto,” a 1985 Star story said, protected by alarms, cameras and anti-theft devices.
“What is this precious cargo? Diamonds? Gold?” the Star’s George Gamester wrote. “Nope. A distinctive Canadian treasure hoarded jealously over the years — in glove compartments, dresser drawers and purses: Canadian Tire coupons.”
The digital age
The first sign of decline came at the turn of the century. Canadian Tire introduced virtual money, collected on its house credit card, in the early 2000s and by February 2012 started testing digital Canadian Tire money in Nova Scotia. It went national in 2014 and was rebranded as Triangle Rewards in 2018.
The world had changed. In 2009, Canadians paid by cash more than half the time. By 2020, only 21 per cent of transactions were with cash, according to the Bank of Canada. Carrying around real currency is now obsolete. Carrying around fake cash is practically unthinkable.
And for Canadian Tire — along with the rest of the retail world — data became too valuable a commodity to pass up, according to Elnahla and Mark Vandenbosch, a professor emeritus at Western University who has researched loyalty programs. A digital loyalty program told the company what and when and how much you bought, what sort of deals you responded to and, with Triangle Rewards spreading across SportChek, Mark’s, Petro-Canada and elsewhere, where else you shopped.
“They’re really paying you for your information,” Vandenbosch said.
Canadian Tire money told the company nothing. It was a piece of paper.
In a statement to the Star, a spokesperson said a digital program made redeeming “faster and more convenient,” and Triangle Rewards “allows us to better understand and serve our customers with personalized, relevant experiences.”
So Canadian Tire stopped issuing the coupons in 2020. The company still accepts physical Canadian Tire money at its stores.
But for 62 years, Canadian Tire money was ubiquitous. It became a part of Canadian culture, sung about in songs and joked about on “Trailer Park Boys” and squirreled away in the wallets and glove compartments of half a country of tens of millions of people. By 2012, more than a billion notes had been put into circulation.
One, a freshly-minted five-cent note, sat in a desk drawer. Green and pristine, the jolly Sandy McTire — the Scotsman bundled in a scarf and bonnet, moustache curling and eyes gleaming — engraved one side of the bill. To his right was a signature.
Stephen Wetmore pulled the bill out of the desk. As recalled in Stoffman’s book, Wetmore pointed to the signature, labelled president and chief executive officer. His signature.
“That’s the reason I took the job, right?” Wetmore smiled. “To get my name on Canadian Tire money.”
With files from Astrid Lange.
