Canadian Tire money is plentiful and more than just useful at your local retail outlet. The Monopoly-esque nigh-legal tender has spread across Canada faster than SARS, West Nile, or Avian Flu. Canadian Tire money, the colourful currency that looks, smells, and feels like real cash...but not quite accepted everywhere.

Now from a distance, Canadian Tire money looked like honest, earnest Canadian money (until they started putting them shiny anti-counterfeiting stripes on them). But upon close examination, you realized that old Sandy McTire, the Scotsman whose face adorns the front of the funny bucks is not exactly the spitting image of Queen Elizabeth Number Two, but then who is?

The crazy Canucklehead money has been rumoured to have been accepted at par at liquor stores, seen spewing out of ATM machines, and even been passed off in American bordertowns as the real McCoy.

Woe be it to the crook who robbed the Canadian Tire safe, filling his sack with mittfuls of purple, blue, and gold paper, for it would've been difficult for that would-be millionaire to cash in all those greenbacks at his local store. You can just imagine him trying to buy that Motomaster combination snow-blower/snow-cone maker with stacks of security-dye stained promotional coupon money.

What started out as an incentive program, has earned its way into popular Canadian culture, and Canadian Tire money will always have a place in our hearts, if not in our wallets.