There is an unmistakable shift underway in Canadian loyalty marketing — and if one event crystallized it this Spring, it was The BIG Handshake Loyalty™ (TBH™) Toronto.
Held in April 2026, and true to its tagline as “loyalty’s friendliest meet-up,” TBH™ brought together a remarkable cross-section of brand practitioners, strategic thinkers, and a selection of technology partners for a day of candid conversation.
What emerged wasn’t as much a single revelation, as a recurring signal: loyalty programs are actively choosing to no longer succeed in isolation. The partnership imperative has arrived.
Setting the Tone: When Loyalty Becomes Infrastructure
The day opened with a session that framed everything that followed. Beth McCoy the CEO of CORA Loyalty and Jason Beales the Chief Commercial and Strategy Officer of AIR MILES/BMO Blue Rewards took the stage for a frank conversation about the state of loyalty in Canada — and they didn’t pull punches. AIR MILES, they acknowledged, had become a poster child for program complexity: a program that grew features and earn pathways over decades until the consumer experience buckled under its weight.
The insight landed hard in the room: having more is not additive. Complexity erodes trust — on both the consumer side and the partner side. The path forward, the speakers argued, runs through simplicity, predictability, and what they called the “stacking effect” — a world where consumers can organically earn multiple currencies across multiple programs in ways that feel cumulative rather than confusing. As BMO Blue Rewards evolves, we can expect this mantra to fuel its success.
The pair posed three questions to challenge every practitioner in the room:
- Which behaviors still need incentivizing versus those that will happen anyway?
- Where are we still designing for program performance rather than a situational consumer world?
- And where can we replace cleverness with logic — swapping optimization tricks for the steady reliability that members actually want?
It was an important frame. And it set a throughline that would surface, in different forms, across every session that followed.
The Throughline: Partnerships as the New Loyalty Operating System
If CORA Loyalty and AIR MILES diagnosed the disease, the rest of the day’s sessions offered variations on the same prescription: go further by going together. The word “partnership” appeared in session titles, practitioner frameworks, and audience questions with a frequency that felt less like coincidence and more like consensus.
Canadian Tire’s Josh Meyer, AVP of Loyalty Partnerships, offered perhaps the most rigorous framework for what this looks like in practice. With 90% of Canadians living within 15 minutes of a Canadian Tire retail location and 12 million active Triangle members, the company is a loyalty juggernaut.
But Meyer was clear that the coalition they’ve assembled — Petro-Canada, Tim Hortons, WestJet, RBC — didn’t happen by accident. It required a clear strategic thesis (fewer, deeper top-tier partnerships rather than chasing the long tail), top-down organizational commitment (the CEO discussing partnerships on earnings calls), and a willingness to accept what he called “asymmetry” — recognizing that the overall proposition must hold even when the financial terms aren’t perfectly balanced.
Amanda Mitchell, Head of Loyalty and who runs Petro Points end-to-end, told a different kind of partnership story: the redesign of a 30-year-old program from the ground up. Launched in January 2026, the new Platinum Status tier was built around a coalition of RBC, Canadian Tire’s Triangle, and WestJet — what Mitchell called a “beautiful coalition of valuable Canadian brands.”
Just 111 days in, the results were already speaking: volume per member up, acquisition outperforming prior efforts, partner link rates improved, and third-party brand perception audits showing measurable gains. Mitchell’s closing thought resonated well beyond the fuel category: go far, because brands and individuals can only go so far alone.
WestJet’s VP of Loyalty, Steve McClelland, told a complementary story. After 12 to 18 months of listening sessions across Canada — dinners with members, testing principles before building product — WestJet Rewards relaunched around three pillars: earn status without flying, earn and burn on more than WestJet, and interact with the program every day. That last pillar is only achievable through partners. Travel may not be every day, but spending is.
Skip told the most dramatic version of the story. Three years ago the brand was fighting for relevance against two U.S.-based global platforms, with global creative that didn’t resonate in Canada. The solution began not with loyalty tactics but with brand clarity — “you need a loyalty strategy only after you know what your brand stands for,” said Rachel MacAdam, VP of Marketing.
The resulting SKIP+ program built emotional loyalty through Canadian cultural partnerships (Live Nation’s Osheaga festival, exclusive to SKIP+ members, drove the program’s largest single enrollment surge), a deep integration with CIBC that now delivers 53% of new customers, and a proprietary points currency that sees five million points redeemed daily. The WestJet partnership, producing average redemptions of $25 in travel value within 72 hours of receiving points, showed what is possible when partners are chosen for resonance rather than convenience.
And then there was CAA Club Group and Maple. CMO for CAA, Shoshana Fruitman, and Maple CEO, Daniel Shearer, presented a partnership that defied the conventional loyalty playbook entirely. Six million Canadians lack access to primary healthcare. CAA’s brand equity — built on trust, safety, and genuine care — gave them the permission to extend into virtual healthcare as a fully funded member benefit.
The result: a membership that members now describe as ten times more valuable than before, with 91% agreeing that Maple adds meaningful value, and healthcare becoming the number-one CAA perk cited by newcomers to Canada. As Fruitman put it, they unlocked the business by doing the right thing first.
Other Signals Worth Noting
Throughout the day, several themes recurred with enough consistency to deserve attention:
- The loyalty trust gap is real and measurable. Engage People cited data showing 80% of brands believe they are delivering value to members, while only 45% of customers agree — a two-to-one perception gap that points to a fundamental disconnect in how programs are designed versus how they are experienced.
- Real-time value is no longer a differentiator — it’s table stakes. Multiple sessions touched on the behavioral science of temporal discounting: the longer members wait to see value from their participation, the less value they perceive. The “earn–collect–wait–redeem” model is giving way to a “join–use–benefit” paradigm, particularly among Millennials and Gen Z.
- Personalization and simplicity are not a trade-off. A sharp moment in the personalization panel — hosted by Eagle Eye and featuring Loblaw, Indigo, and RBC — challenged the false dichotomy between offering tailored experiences and keeping programs easy to navigate. Personalization is the brand’s job. Simplicity is what the consumer experiences as the outcome.
- Loyalty programs need to speak the language of the C-suite. Chatime CEO, Trinh Tham, offered a quietly powerful reflection on the gap between how loyalty professionals think about their work (deepening relationships) and how executives evaluate it (revenue, growth, EBITDA, risk). Bridging that gap — building clarity from the start, not just at reporting time — is the internal partnership that most loyalty teams still need to strengthen.
- Bond Brand Loyalty closed the day with data from the 2026 Bond Loyalty Report, reframing loyalty not as a program to be managed but as a growth engine to be operated. The shift in metrics they advocated — from traditional KPIs to share of wallet, revenue retention, incremental revenue contribution, and referral rates — is the same language shift that unlocks C-suite attention. Their conclusion aligned neatly with everything the day had surfaced: partnership programs are now demonstrably driving higher results across the Canadian loyalty landscape.
Brands and Organizations on Stage
The full speaker roster at TBH Loyalty™ Toronto 2026 included representation from: CORA Loyalty, BMO AIR MILES (Blue Rewards), Eagle Eye, Loblaw, Indigo, RBC, Petro-Canada (Petro Points), Home Hardware, Comarch, CAA Club Group, Maple, Skip, Canadian Tire (Triangle), WestJet, Chatime, and Bond Brand Loyalty.
The Human Question That Lingers
Jennifer Bryl of Home Hardware offered a mid-day provocation that cut against the data-heavy current of the day: have we lost the human connection in loyalty? Drawing on hospitality benchmarks — Marriott, Delta Privileges, the hotel industry’s long tradition of making members feel known rather than tracked — she posed three questions that every brand in the room should sit with:
- Do you actually know your customer?
- Is your organization truly aligned to a loyalty-first culture?
- And where, concretely, does the human connection live in your brand?
It’s the question that partnerships, however well-structured, cannot answer on their own. The infrastructure of coalition loyalty is becoming table stakes. What differentiates the programs that will endure — as CORA Loyalty and AIR MILES reminded us at the start of the day — is whether members trust you to be consistent, predictable, and genuinely on their side.
Join the Conversation in Chicago
If this event in Toronto is an indication, The BIG Handshake Loyalty™ is taking aim to establish itself as a new loyalty-focused event provider within North America. The team is bringing the format next to Chicago on November 10th — and the calibre of dialogue in Toronto has set a strong standard. Details for this fall can be found at tbhchicago.com or get access here.
The BIG Handshake Loyalty events are produced by Hadie Perkas and Costas Perkas, Co-founders of the European Loyalty Association™ and North American Loyalty Association™, of which the latter recently announced Lia Grimberg as Chief Engagement and Growth Officer who hosted TBH Loyalty™ Toronto.
Aaron Dauphinee is the Chief Marketing Officer at Wise Marketer Group, publishers of The Wise Marketer™ and home of the Loyalty Academy™ and the CLMP™ designation.