Canadian Tire Corporation is a Canadian retail company operating stores across automotive, hardware, sports, apparel, home, and seasonal categories in 1,600+ locations nationwide. Its operations include major retail banners such as Canadian Tire, Mark’s and SportChek, alongside the Triangle Rewards loyalty program, banking services through Canadian Tire Bank and a large commercial real estate portfolio through CT REIT.
You've described Canadian Tire as being "in your blood." What has kept you there for such a significant portion of your career?
I have strong family connections to the brand. My father was an officer of the company before becoming a Canadian Tire dealer (what others would call a franchisee). I worked with him in stores through high school and university. I had two uncles who were Canadian Tire dealers, and today my brother is a Canadian Tire dealer.
For me, it wasn't a job; it was the job. Canadian Tire is a 104-year-old retailer that has become one of Canada's most trusted brands. Ninety per cent of Canadians live within a 15-minute drive of a store, seven out of 10 households have a Triangle loyalty membership, and every dollar we make translates into 14 for other Canadian companies. We employ tens of thousands of Canadians and have invested more than $100 million into amateur sport. That has all manifested in our purpose: we're here to make life in Canada better. One thing Canadians often tell us when they move abroad is that they miss Canadian Tire—even the smell. We actually turned that scent into a candle a few Christmases ago, and Canadians loved it.
Was the pandemic a defining leadership moment for you, and what did it reveal about Canadian Tire's role in Canadian life?
It was certainly a standout moment. I've said before that it was a masterclass in leadership for me personally. What COVID reinforced was that this brand shows up for life in Canada no matter what life looks like.
The first priority was protecting the health and safety of our employees and customers. But it quickly became about helping Canadians manage daily life while locked down, whether through home repair, outdoor living, gardening or recreation. Our dealers also stepped up in their communities through donations and local support. It crystallized a more defining role for us, and our purpose statement—"We're here to make life in Canada better"—was really born out of how the brand showed up during COVID.
You've got visibility into billions of dollars of consumer spending across the country. What does that data tell you about the mood and behaviour of Canadian consumers today?
Consumers are fairly clear-eyed about the economic challenges the country is facing, but their chins are up. There's optimism around what's going on in the country, and Canadians are proving more resilient than many would have expected. We're seeing that even among low-income, high-debt-burdened households. We're fortunate to get signals through our credit card business, which gives us visibility to approximately $25 billion in consumer spending, most of it outside our own companies.
It's been quite volatile since Russia invaded Ukraine - what many people thought would be transitory inflation became much more persistent. Through 2023 and 2024, households were dealing with rising housing costs, food prices, interest rates and household bills all at once. As a retailer that sells a lot of discretionary products, that's where Canadians pulled back, and it had us leaning much more heavily into essentials. We began to see improvement in 2025 as interest rates came down significantly and household balance sheets improved, but now we're dealing with another geopolitical event and rising gas prices. Recently, Canadians have spent roughly 40% more on gas than they did a year ago. We're also seeing consumers become more purposeful in who they buy from and what they buy. They're looking for value, which is why we've lowered prices on thousands of SKUs while continuing to build engagement and trust. The good news is we now have a playbook and understand what Canadians are looking for if these conditions continue.
What makes the Canadian retail environment unique?
I don't think the competitive structure is materially different from the United States. The major scale players are all here—Amazon, Costco, Walmart, Home Depot and Chinese marketplaces. Scale players continue to take share while many smaller retailers are under pressure.
The biggest difference is geography. Many US retailers have underestimated the vastness of Canada and the supply chain required to serve it profitably. We've spent more than 100 years building the infrastructure needed to serve both rural communities and major urban centres. Our retail strategy has to work for a town of 10,000 people or downtown Toronto, and that reach is really unrivalled. That’s how we show up and compete against the scale players.
Technology is reshaping retail at a rapid pace. Where are you already seeing AI make a meaningful difference at Canadian Tire?
As we looked at the next era of retail, we saw three major forces: fierce global competition, technology increasingly separating leaders from laggards, and rapidly changing customer expectations. That thinking led to our True North strategy. At the time, Canadian Tire was operating much more like a conglomerate, with multiple customer-facing banners operating independently. True North brings those assets together into one operating company, where our first-party data and understanding of Canadians become the fuel for a connected system of businesses.
We believe AI can help pivot us from a retailer that sells products to a retail system that serves the occasions of life in Canada. AI isn't just reinventing retail—it's becoming retail.
It unlocks two big strengths: Our unmatched relationship with Canadians and our growing first-party data. We have a level of fidelity and insights we couldn’t have imagined even a year ago. One example involved a spike in demand for cleaning products during the last week of August and first week of September. We asked AI to identify the shopping occasion behind it, and the model concluded with a very high degree of confidence that it was a back-to-dorm shopping occasion. It reached that conclusion by combining external data about nearby universities with information from our membership base and then identifying all the related products associated with that occasion. That changes how we merchandise stores, allocate inventory, personalize communications, promote products digitally and make pricing decisions. We've now identified thousands of occasions like this through our MOSaiC platform, which we co-developed with Microsoft.
When you look at Canada's next chapter, what will determine whether the country succeeds?
As a 104-year-old retailer, we naturally think in longer time horizons. We're trying to build a company that can prosper 20 to 30 years from now while improving its competitive position and continuing to contribute positively to Canada. For me, it starts with ambition. What level of ambition do we have as leaders for the country, and how does that manifest itself in the way we invest?
The investment posture is becoming more positive. Large pension funds are increasingly open to investing more domestically, and policymakers seem to be shifting from simply expecting investment to creating genuine partnership opportunities. There's still work to do around tax and regulatory reform, but there is more optimism among business leaders and a growing recognition that we all have a role to play in building the country's prosperity. For us, the Canadian imperative is building from legacy strengths to meet the challenges and opportunities of a new era, and that’s very much the Canadian Tire imperative. It's going to take ambition, leadership and real action from both government and business leaders working together.
