From left to right, the e-Canadian Tire 'Money' rewards card, a smart phone displaying the Canadian Tire rewards app, and the Canadian Tire credit card at a press conference in Toronto on Sept. 9, 2014.Darren Calabrese/The Canadian Press

Vass Bednar is a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail and host of the new podcast, Lately. She is the executive director of McMaster University’s master of public policy in digital society program.

Imagine Scotiabank encouraging you to buy a car, or RBC trying to sell you a house so that it can lock you into a mortgage. It would seem odd, and scam-like. And yet we tolerate the reverse when retailers expand into banking.

Despite the Big Six’s dominance in Canada, we have more banks than we think. But a few of those other options to manage your money are retailers, too – encouraging you to borrow money and spend it in their stores. A private retailer’s primary motive of profit maximization is at odds with the fiscal prudence that a bank is supposed to encourage you to practise. This duality is duplicitous.

While Canadian Tire may have once felt bank-like with its Monopoly-money-esque loyalty coupons, it turns out that Canadian Tire Bank has been licensed under Canada’s notoriously stringent Bank Act since 2003 (for real money). Its associated Triangle........

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