Finally a Use For Canadian Tire Money

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I found out about this organization, Canadian Tire Money - Helping the Homeless, on Facebook, and to assay rebuke on issues of objectivity I should reveal that I am a member. Of course I think it's a great cause -providing food and supplies to the homeless of Vancouver - but I also just like the style of this problem solving - grab a withering, vestigial limb from the commercial realm and co-opt it toward something new, something socially engaged...something other than a Bilge Pump. (If that, in fact, is what you are supposed to do with Canadian Tire money. The mystery, of course, persists.)

Canadian Tire is a classic Canadian institution: a store well known to Canadians as a place to purchase a barbeque, a garden hose, or anything made out of foam. In small towns where you will not find a bank or a newspaper, you will still find a Canadian Tire. It is a hardware store, but so much more. You could call it Canada's Wal-Mart, but that would miss the point: it is not just a store, and certainly not a superstore, and there is nothing crass, nothing commercial. It is difficult to purchase something there. It takes patience, time, and commitment. Many customer service representatives will try to help you, and many will fail. And if you triumph in the end, and leave with a basketful of tarps, a pressurized sprayer, and a Gardener's Kneeler, items you will need in order to brave your existence in the Canadian tundra, you will also have, somewhere on your person, a handful of "money-style" paper. This, to Jeff Birmingham, is the bonanza.

Jeff Birmingham is asking people to send their unused Canadian Tire money to him at his West End apartment in Vancouver, so he can redeem it purchasing supplies which he will then donate to Vancouver's homeless.

His Facebook group has grown from 1 member (Birmingham) to over 300, in a month.  

His logic is that noone is using Canadian Tire money anyway, that it doesn't cost anyone anything (not even Canadian Tire), and that it goes to people who need it.

But one of the challenges of Canadian Tire money is that it comes in
denominations which shock you with their tininess. Your bill might have
been $175.00 but it is unlikely that your handful of colourful Canadian
Tire money gets anywhere north of a $2.

Commentary on the group's discussion board has suggested that he ramp it up a little bit and approach Canadian Tire for matching funds with which to bolster this initiative. It is a suggestion which goes toward one lingering objection to this initiative -- just how much effort is going toward collecting all this Canadian Tire money, and how much merchandise will it really translate to for the community in need? Wouldn't more financial resources be derived from a more directed fundraising approach?

But that's also what is so charming. What Birmingham is collecting is the loose change of the commercial institution, the micro-economy that emerges from the wasted wastes of the wasteland. It's not just the untenable, consumerist drive to colonize the outdoors that supports Canadian Tire.  It's not just the strange world of products like Garden Weasels, mock-Colonial security halogen lamps, and Motomaster Total Terrain AT Tires that emerge from this framework, creating desire, creating need, and creating an economy that has been in operation in Canada since 1922. it's the tertiary level of waste, the refuse disguised as a loyalty program - the most popular and enduring loyalty program in Canada! - that creates a semi-currency of loose change from all of these transactions. And there's only so far you can go in the cycle of waste before you are talking about reuse.

So what Birmingham is doing becomes marvelously progressive. Recycling the detritus of commercial loyalty programs toward helping people who need it. So simple, so pure, and isn't it about time someone came up with a way to use the damn stuff? Go fumble in your kitchen drawer now, and send it to Birmingham.