The best credit card reward programs
By Andre Mayer • Bankrate.com

When the first credit card -- issued by Diners Club -- was introduced in 1951, its greatest advantage was that it spared you from carrying large sums of cash. While that's ostensibly still the reason to own a Diners Club, Visa, MasterCard or American Express card 50 years later, it's easy to forget your card's prime function given all the peripheral offerings that come with it.

The era of convergence and cross-promotion has led to the notion of rewarding consumers for credit card use. Most cards today tout some sort of loyalty program -- an added incentive for you, the cardholder, to flash your plastic.

The most popular rewards are travel points, in which you earn points toward airline flights every time you use your credit card. But that's only the beginning: these days, you can earn merchandise, gift certificates, even money, simply for uttering those timeless words: "Charge it."

We've sifted through the sundry credit-card rewards programs in Canada to dig up the gems. Naturally, there's fine print with all of these cards, but if you employ them wisely, they're indisputably beneficial. (Note: most credit cards won't let you earn rewards on returned items or cash advances.)

CIBC Aerogold Visa
For amassing Air Canada Aeroplan Miles, this one is hard to trump. You earn one Aeroplan Mile for every dollar you spend on the card. (Bear in mind that short-haul flights require 15,000 Aeroplan Miles, flights within Canada and the continental United States require 25,000 and a flight to Australia, as a long-haul example, requires 75,000 miles.)

Plus, when you book an Air Canada flight with your Aerogold card, you receive double the Aeroplan Miles. Sign up online, and you get a welcome bonus of 5,000 miles.

There is a fee, but the average Aerogold cardholder earns a free short-haul flight (e.g. Toronto to Winnipeg or Vancouver to Calgary) every year, which can easily cost twice as much as the card's annual $120 levy.

RBC Rewards Visa
For every $2 you charge to your RBC Rewards Visa, you get one RBC Rewards point. The RBC Rewards catalogue has an immense array of merchandise and gift certificates.

The highlights: 3,500 points (i.e., $7,000 charged) earns you two free Famous Players movie passes, 8,000 points ($16,000 charged) nabs you a Nike backpack and 12,000 points ($24,000 charged) equals a $100 gift certificate at Future Shop.

Granted, it'll take a lot of swipes at the grocery-store checkout to amass enough points to redeem rewards, but given that this card has no annual fee, you might as well enjoy its ancillary advantages.

President's Choice MasterCard
For every $1 you charge to this card, you earn 10 PC Points. You can redeem 20,000 points for $20 in free groceries or wait and keep diligently charging for larger prizes: a Panasonic portable CD/MP3 Player is 130,000 points, while a seven-night stay in Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic, is 800,000 points (saving for the latter being an exercise in monk-like patience).

There's no annual fee, and if you're a member of Petro-Canada's PETRO-Points program, you can exchange PC Points one-for-one and redeem them for gas, which isn't such a bad idea considering the price of gas these days.

TD Gold Elite Visa
Every time you use your TD Gold Elite Visa, you earn a one-percent cash rebate on the net purchases charged to your card. If, over the course of a year, for example, you charge $10,000 to your card, you receive $100 back. (The rebate is paid to you at year's end.)

The catch: there's a $99 annual fee, so in order to capitalize on the arrangement, you should try to charge everything to your card -- gifts, groceries, movie tickets, bills, travel expenses, you name it.

If you use the TD Gold Elite Visa liberally while ensuring that you settle your balance at the end of each month, this card will actually make you money. Charge $20,000 over the course of a year, and you've made a tidy profit of $101.

Citi Driver's Edge Platinum MasterCard
Issued by Citibank, this card rewards you with two percent cash back on all purchases to go toward the acquisition of a car, new or used, foreign or domestic.

While there's no annual fee, there are restrictions: you can only earn $1,000 in rebates in any 12-month period, and when you eventually buy those coveted wheels, you can't use more than $5,000 in rebated money on the purchase.

When you're ready to purchase the vehicle, you pay the entire amount yourself. Then, within 60 days, you send Citibank proof of the sale and they'll refund the sum of the rebate within three weeks.

Visa Desjardins Odyssey Gold (Quebec)
Tied to the Quebec bank Caisse Desjardins (and thus not available outside la belle province), the Visa Desjardins Odyssey Gold card entices consumers with BONUSDOLLARS. With each Visa purchase made in Canada, you get 1 percent back in BONUSDOLLARS; for some inexplicable reason, you get two percent back in BONUSDOLLARS if you swipe your Visa outside the country.

BONUSDOLLARS are redeemable on travel, theatre tickets and a host of other goodies: a Nike sports watch costs 112 BONUSDOLLARS, while a Uniden cordless phone is 94 BONUSDOLLARS.

The $90 annual fee seems a bit of drawback, but people who have no trouble charging $25,000 a year to their credit card can walk away with a Broil King barbecue (252 BONUSDOLLARS).

Canadian Tire Options MasterCard
Canadian Tire money, the Monopoly-like currency you earn for every purchase at Canadian Tire, is as much an institution as the store itself. Ordinarily, you get back 10 cents for every $5.41 you spend.

With the Canadian Tire Options MasterCard, however, you get 20 percent more, which means 12 cents for every $5.41. That might seem skimpy, but it works out to 2.2 percent back if you spend more than $5.41, a rate that bests most other credit cards.

There's no annual fee, but the interest rates for department store-affiliated cards tend to skew higher; depending on what you qualify for, the interest rate on this card is between 18.9 and 25.9 percent.

Thinking about getting a new, more rewarding credit card? Click here to check out current credit card rates.

Andre Mayer is a writer in Toronto.