I should start by saying we don't know if the Clerk was scanning an air miles like object for a procedural reason. Shell in Canada often requires strange things to be scanned to activate different promotions and deal with air miles. It's possible the clerk was being perfectly legitimate.

If the clerk was collecting the points for his own benefit he likely committed "theft under" contrary to the Criminal Code of Canada.

Aeroplan and Air Miles are taxable benefits by the CRA (at least if collected the course of employment). See Griffen et al. v The Queen [1995] (Tax Court of Canada). Yes - that means you're supposed to declare them.

The points do have value and they didn't belong to him. He took them.

The rough value of 40 air miles is $4.00. (Air Miles are generally worth about $0.10 - $0.15 each - I'm not getting into that explanation here).

It is not that likely the Crown (Canadian prosecutor) would be interested in going after a gas store clerk who probably didn't know he was stealing.

More importantly to the clerk, it is probably a breach of his terms of employment. We cannot know for sure but it's a good guess.

This happens a lot at companies with reward programs that don't have to be connected to a credit card (shopper's drug mart, sobey's, famous players, to name a few).

So there we are.