Tucked away in a corner of the second floor at the Hudson’s Bay Company’s historic downtown Calgary store stood one of several small armies of bare mannequins awaiting their fate. Read More
How Canada today can inspire itself from the Hudson’s Bay Company of the late 19th century, which sought to drive economic development in the West
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How Canada today can inspire itself from the Hudson’s Bay Company of the late 19th century, which sought to drive economic development in the West
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Tucked away in a corner of the second floor at the Hudson’s Bay Company’s historic downtown Calgary store stood one of several small armies of bare mannequins awaiting their fate.
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One of them seemed defiant over Hudson Bay’s demise: Someone had arranged the fingers on its left hand on Saturday such that it was flipping the bird.
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The same mannequin was slightly less vocal on Sunday, its left hand now forming an upturned fist, as if trying to goad someone into a fight.
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But there was no more fight left in HBC.
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With no one to save the company after it sought protection from creditors on March 7, its liquidation sale concluded at closing time on June 1.
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What was once the oldest retailer in North America shut its doors for good after 355 years and one month in operation, leaving some 8,300 people out of work and causing further economic ripples through the retail sector.
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At lunchtime on Sunday, the third floor of the downtown Calgary location had already been shut down earlier and was no longer accessible. The second floor was pretty much picked clean, with one lonely pair of sky blue men’s shorts hanging from a rack amid a sea of empty store fixtures heading for a second life at some other retailer.
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On the main floor, shoppers scoured through the last remaining items of women’s clothing and jewelry in one corner of the store, while more people milled around at the other corner, where many olds books and other items previously used for staging were being sold at discount prices.
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HBC’s liquidation marked the sad end to an enterprise whose charter was granted by King Charles II on May 2, 1670, establishing The Governor and Company of Adventurers of England, trading into Hudson’s Bay.
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And what an adventure. Over the ensuing centuries, what was more commonly known as the Hudson’s Bay Company — or to generations of shoppers, simply The Bay — would end up shaping the people and economy of what is now Western Canada.
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In 1957, HBC published a book about its first 200 years called Hudson’s Bay Company 1670-1870, authored by E.E. Rich.
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It contained a foreword by Sir Winston Churchill, who was effusive in his praise and appraisal of the company’s historical impact.
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“Many great merchant expeditions set out in the last four centuries from the shores of these (British) Islands and materially altered the history of the lands to which they sailed,” Churchill wrote.
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“Of these, none was more prominent than the Hudson’s Bay Company. Its resounding title, ‘The Adventurers of England Trading into Hudson’s Bay,’ aptly conveys the spirit which has imbued it from its Royal origins in the 17th century to the present day.
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“Its interests have swelled from the early trading posts, where furs were the principal article of trade, to the vast commercial undertakings of the 20th century, when the Company is active in so many spheres of exploration and development in every Province of Canada.”
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Hudson’s Bay Company made huge contribution to Western Canada
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HBC had a long, storied and celebrated past. But for as long as most of us have been alive, The Bay was just another department store among many.
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It can be easy to forget how HBC had dabbled in businesses other than retail, how its history is intertwined with that of the entire continent, and how long the company’s been around. It’d mind-blowing to think this private enterprise was so old, its founding predated the United States’ declaration of independence by more than a century, and the creation of the Dominion of Canada by almost two.
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People including myself wax poetic about the contribution of railways in shaping Western Canada but the Hudson’s Bay Company played a significant role, too.
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HBC was established to give it a full monopoly on business in a huge tract of territory called Rupert’s Land, which today makes up the Prairies, Nunavut, northern Ontario, northern Quebec, and parts of the United States.
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The company’s original 1670 charter granted its people the power to take on an “Expedition for Hudson’s Bay in the North-west Part of America, for the Discovery of a new Passage into the South Sea, and for the finding some Trade for Furs, Minerals, and other considerable Commodities,” with absolute control over its vast territory.
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Although HBC was deeply connected with Canadian identity, its business was truly transnational.
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Hudson’s Bay was “an English company claiming and helping to colonize huge swathes of North America, inhabited by sovereign Indigenous nations,” wrote Melissa Gismondi in Canadian Geographic Magazine in May 2020, coinciding with the company’s 350th anniversary. “From London parlours to Cree communities to the U.S. Senate, it’s a story that connects Canadian history to world history — to the demands of European consumers, the decisions of English officials, the aspirations of Scottish traders and the futures of diverse Indigenous Peoples.”
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The drive to explore and to establish trade relations with First Nations and Inuit people would lead to the establishment of many settlements across the West — Edmonton and Winnipeg along them — places growing into cities and towns that would eventually become part of Canada when control of Rupert’s Land was sold.
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The sale of Rupert’s Land to the new Dominion, as described in the Canadian Geographic article above, offers historical echoes of politics in 2025.
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First, the transaction was contested by First Nations leaders who didn’t believe HBC had a right to sell the land in the first place. They argued the company didn’t really own the territory, despite what was spelled out in the HBC charter.
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Second, the transfer of Rupert’s Land was meant to block a northward expansion of the United States. Indeed, many Americans had expressed huge interest in buying the territory and its natural resources.
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Neither of those items would feel out of place if they suddenly appeared in our news feeds today.
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The historical parallels don’t end there.
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The Bay’s relinquishing of Rupert’s Land in 1870 started a new chapter in the company’s saga, when HBC began to cement its place not just as a Canadian and global business powerhouse but as the spark to continue developing and growing the West.
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“Relieved of the burden of Government, the Hudson’s Bay Company threw itself heartily into the work of developing its resources,” wrote author George Bryce in The Remarkable History of the Hudson’s Bay Company, a book published in 1910.
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“The Company’s operations are vaster than ever before. The greatest mercantile enterprise of the Greater Canada west of Lake Superior; a strong land Company, still keeping up its traditions and conducting a large trade in furs; owning vessels and transportation facilities; able to take large contracts; exercising a fatherly care over the Indian tribes; the helper and assistant of the vast missionary organizations scattered over Northern Canada, the Company since the transfer of Rupert’s Land to Canada has taken a new lease of life; its eye is not dim, nor its natural force abated.”
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Great potential for economic development — then and now
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Going back more than a century, people could see the potential of Western Canada to supply the world with all the resources it needed and they believed Hudson’s Bay would be the company to get it done — or at least help open the door.
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“The Archean region on the south and west of Hudson Bay undoubtedly contains great mineral treasures,” Bryce wrote more than a century ago, long before anyone could have envisioned the immense reserves of black gold under our feet, alongside all the other riches hidden in the earth. “The Canadian Government pledges itself to a completed railway from the prairie wheat fields to York Factory on Hudson Bay. This will bring the seaport on Hudson Bay as near Britain as is New York, and will make an enormous saving in transportation to Western Canada.”
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That rail line ended up terminating farther north in Churchill instead, but the idea of northern Manitoba becoming a gateway for world trade sounds very much like the kind of talk modern-day Canada is engaging in.
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Of course, much has changed in the 115 years since the publication of Bryce’s book.
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The Hudson’s Bay Company managed to survive decades of colonial conflicts; a transformation from a quasi-governmental commercial monopoly to a pure business in a competitive marketplace; several global economic crises, including the Great Depression; and two world wars — somehow finding a way to adapt and meet the various challenges of the day.
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Alas, it was the strains of retail coupled with what’s been described by some as an unhealthy corporate union that eventually caused HBC to spiral into insolvency after more than three-and-a-half centuries as a going concern.
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In 2008, The Bay was taken over by a U.S. private equity firm that might not have had the necessary desire, interest or expertise to keep the Hudson’s Bay Company alive.
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HBC had become just another company — the latest in a long line of historic department stores and retailers in Canada and the United States whose stories have come to a sudden end over the last few decades.
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In the The Bay’s final hours, watching last-minute shoppers rummaging for a good liquidation deal amid the dregs of a dwindling stock of merchandise, it might have been difficult to trace the long path through the company’s history to the same but very different corporate entity — The Governor and Company of Adventurers of England, trading into Hudson’s Bay — that held great power and sway over North America and the course of its history.
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The path behind might be hard to see but it’s there. And so is the path forward but sadly, HBC won’t be the one to navigate it.
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Given the current political context and an uncertain trade relationship with the United States, Canadians are expressing a newfound desire for nation-building projects and interest in reconnecting with national institutions.
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It seems fitting that HBC’s and Canada’s economic motivations after the company’s surrender of Rupert’s Land in 1870 very much mirror the rekindled current of nationalism we are experiencing now in 2025.
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The Hudson’s Bay Company might be gone, but its aspirations speak as loud now as they did in HBC’s heyday, sharing a message to be seized and acted upon by business and political leaders of our time.
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