Some business careers start with a five-year plan. Martha Billes started with a boardroom full of people who assumed she would not stay long. Nearly forty-five years later, the daughter of Canadian Tire co-founder A.J. Billes is one of the most consequential figures in the company’s history, and this year the Southern Alberta Business Hall of Fame is adding her name to its 2026 class of laureates.
A Path That Was Not Handed to Her
Billes was born in Toronto in 1940, and her surname alone might have suggested an easy route into the family business. It did not work that way. She earned a degree from the University of Toronto’s Macdonald Institute, now folded into the University of Guelph, in 1963, then went to work at Lever Brothers and the Ontario Research Foundation before spending a stretch teaching in Toronto and Ottawa. Those years built the kind of practical judgment that does not show up on an organizational chart but tends to matter more than most credentials once the real decisions start piling up.
She joined the Canadian Tire board of directors in 1980, at a time when a woman holding that seat was still a rarity in Canadian corporate life. What followed was nearly two decades of family negotiation, corporate maneuvering, and steady persistence. By 1997, Billes had become the company’s controlling shareholder, a position that let her shape Canadian Tire’s direction for a generation of shoppers who likely never knew her name.
Turning Corporate Success Into Community Investment
Business success on its own rarely earns a place in a hall of fame built for community impact, and Billes seemed to understand that instinctively. In 2005, she co-founded Canadian Tire Jumpstart Charities, built on a simple premise: no child should be shut out of organized sport because a family cannot afford the registration fee, the equipment, or the ride to practice. A decade later, in 2015, she brought together leading voices in Canadian women’s sport, a conversation that led directly to Jumpstart’s Girls in Sport initiative and, later, to the Women’s Sport Initiative at Canadian Tire, which now directs at least half of the company’s sports sponsorship dollars toward women’s professional leagues, including the Professional Women’s Hockey League and the Northern Super League.
Billes pushed further still in 2017, working with Canadian Tire dealers across the country to launch Jumpstart’s Inclusive Playgrounds, part of a broader Inclusive Play Program aimed at making recreation spaces genuinely open to kids of every ability. It is one thing to fund a program. It is another to keep showing up, year after year, to widen its reach, and that pattern runs through Billes’s philanthropic record.
Recognition That Followed Decades of Work
The honours arrived steadily once the work had already spoken for itself. In 2017, the University of Guelph named Billes its ninth chancellor, making her the first alumna to hold the post. In 2020, she was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada for her contributions to business and philanthropy. Then in 2025, Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame inducted her and presented the Order of Sport, the country’s highest sporting honour, in recognition of everything she had built for young athletes who will likely never trace the connection back to a boardroom decision made decades earlier.
What stands out about Billes’s record is not any single achievement but the consistency of it. A retailer reshaped from the inside. A charity that grew from an idea into a national fixture. A university that chose her to represent it. Calgary and southern Alberta will welcome her into the Business Hall of Fame this year, and the region’s young entrepreneurs would do well to notice that her path had very little to do with luck and a great deal to do with simply staying in the room.
What might change in southern Alberta’s business community if more leaders treated philanthropy the way Martha Billes treated Canadian Tire’s boardroom, as a place to keep showing up long after anyone would have blamed you for walking away?
