On the 3rd of December 2025, in a Toronto law office, the last thing the oldest company in North America had left to sell came up for auction. There was exactly one bid: $18 million for a document written in 1670, the piece of parchment that once handed a single company a third of what is now Canada. Six months earlier, 80 stores had closed and 8,347 people had been fired without severance. The auction took about as long as it takes to read that sentence.
The item on offer was five sheets of vellum, stretched scraped animal skin bound together and hung with a wax great seal so brittle that moving it required conservators and a custom climate case. The ink went onto it on the 2nd of May 1670. It carries the signature of Charles II, who signed away territory he had never seen and could not have described. The charter created the Governor and Company of Adventurers of England trading into Hudson’s Bay.
It granted that company exclusive trade over every river and stream that drained into Hudson Bay. In practice, the grant covered about 3,860,000 square kilometres, roughly a million and a half square miles, about a third of modern Canada, an area larger than India. It went to 18 men in a room. Their first governor was Prince Rupert of the Rhine, the king’s cousin, a cavalry commander who never once traveled to the territory that carried his name for the next 200 years.
The company motto was pro pelle cutem: for skin. The idea had not even been English. It belonged to two French traders, Pierre-Esprit Radisson and Médard des Groseilliers, brothers-in-law who had gone deep into the country west of the Great Lakes and concluded that everyone was doing it backwards. The French carried furs out overland by canoe down to Montreal, losing a season to the distance.
The best pelts, the thick northern ones worth real money in a London hat shop, came from around the great inland sea to the north. Sail into that sea, and the ships could come to the furs. New France did not want to know. The two took the idea to England, and in June 1668 two small vessels left with English money behind them.
One turned back. The other, the Nonsuch, a ketch about 43 feet long, made it into James Bay and wintered there. She came home with a cargo that paid for itself many times over. Two years later, the king signed the parchment.
The fur trade was retail, not romance. The company’s unit of account was the Made Beaver, one prime adult beaver pelt in good condition, and everything in the post was tagged against it. At York Factory, a marten was one made beaver, a gallon of brandy four, a yard of cloth three and a half, a blanket seven, a musket around ten or twelve, which meant a trapper worked most of a winter for a gun. The company struck brass tokens in fractions of a made beaver so the arithmetic could be done across a counter.
The factors running the posts were quietly encouraged to trade at rates rather better than the official ones, and that gap was the margin. Two hundred years before the first department store, the company already knew exactly what it was. The blanket on that price list outlived everything else in the building. The company had traded woolen blankets from the beginning but did not commission its own until 1779, when a trader named Jérémie Mélanger turned up at Hudson’s Bay House in London looking for work and handed over a list of suggestions.
One was to stock pointed blankets, blankets with short black lines woven into the edge near one corner. Canadians have been told for generations that the points recorded how many beaver pelts the blanket cost. They did not. They recorded size, so a trader could tell a three-point from a four-point in a stack without unfolding it.
The colors came later, around 1800, chosen for an even flatter reason: green, red, yellow, and indigo were the dyes that held fast and did not run. For a hundred years, the company sat on the shore of the bay and let the trade come to it. Then Montreal organized. The North West Company, formed out of the old French roots in the 1770s and 80s, pushed inland and met the trappers long before they got anywhere near a Hudson’s Bay factory.
What followed was not polite commercial competition. It was two armed corporations operating across a continent with no police in it. They burned each other’s posts and blocked each other’s provisions. On the 19th of June 1816, near a stand of trees called Seven Oaks, on ground that now sits inside the city of Winnipeg, a confrontation left 21 settlers and the governor of the Red River Colony dead.
Five years later, the British government ended the war by forcing the two companies together. The North West Company was folded in. The surviving name and charter was Hudson’s Bay. What the company did with the resulting monopoly was govern for nearly 40 years.
George Simpson, a Scot who arrived in 1820, was handed the northern department the year the merger went through. He was an auditor with an empire, and the first thing he did was cut. By 1825 he had reduced staff by more than half, cut wages, and closed every redundant post. Then he spent the next three decades traveling the country by canoe at speeds that appalled the men paddling for him, 5,000 miles in a single season on one trip.
He traveled with a personal highland piper whose job was to start playing as the canoe came within sight of a post so everybody inside had time to be standing up straight when he stepped ashore. The men called him the Little Emperor. He was for every practical purpose the government of a third of a continent, and nobody had elected him to anything. Then it sold the whole thing.
In 1869, the new Dominion of Canada wanted the West, and the company agreed to hand it over. The price was £300,000 for a territory the size of India. It remains the largest transfer of land by area in Canadian history. But the deed had terms.
The company kept every one of its trading posts and the ground immediately around them, and it kept 1/20th of all the arable land in the fertile belt, the good farmland that settlers were about to pour into by the hundreds of thousands. It gave up the empire and kept the corners. Nobody thought much about that clause at the time, and it took about 40 years to detonate. The handover did not go smoothly, because the company had sold something it did not entirely possess.
There were people living in the Red River settlement, Métis families farming long river lots, and nobody had asked them anything at all. Surveyors appeared. Louis Riel and a provisional government stopped the surveyors, turned the incoming lieutenant governor back at the border, and negotiated the terms that became the Manitoba Act. The transfer was delayed until the 15th of July 1870.
The shape repeats: in 1670, a third of a continent changed hands in London without a word to anyone living on it. In 1869, the same territory changed hands again the same way. Why does a fur company open a department store? Because of the corners.
In 1881, it opened a retail shop in Winnipeg, less a strategic pivot than a landlord noticing that the ground beneath him had filled up with customers. Settlers were arriving by the trainload into towns that had grown up around the old posts on land the company had specifically reserved for itself. It already owned the best block in a dozen new cities. In 1913, it committed to six stores at once: Calgary, Edmonton, Vancouver, Victoria, Winnipeg, and Saskatoon.
Grand stone department stores on prime downtown corners, with columns and high ceilings and a tea room upstairs. The stores were not the business. The stores were how a landlord collected on ground that had cost him nothing. The Winnipeg store that opened in 1926 was six floors of limestone with an operator in every elevator, a hair salon, a restaurant on the sixth floor, and Christmas windows that people took their children downtown specifically to stand in front of.
These were not shops. They were the civic living room of every city that had one. Canadians registered for their weddings there. They bought a first suit there.
For most of the 20th century, the company simply bought whatever else the country had: Morgan’s in 1960, Freiman’s in 1972, Zellers in 1978, Simpsons the same year, Woodwards in 1993. When Kmart gave up on Canada in 1998, the company took 112 of its stores. By the end of the 1990s, there was a version of this business at every price point in the country. The first real warning came from the competition, and nobody read it as a warning.
Eaton’s, the catalog that had furnished the prairies, declared bankruptcy in 1999 and was gone. Sears Canada was liquidated in 2018. Each time, the Bay absorbed some of the anchor spaces and looked like a winner. What it actually meant was that the format itself had failed twice in the same market.
A department store is a building that sells everything moderately well to people who have to come downtown anyway. By 2000, nobody had to come downtown. By 2010, nobody had to go anywhere. In 2006, the company was bought by Jerry Zucker, an inventor and industrialist from Charleston, South Carolina.
After 336 years, the Hudson’s Bay Company was foreign-owned. Zucker applied for Canadian citizenship and received it. He died of brain cancer in April 2008, and his family sold. The buyer was NRDC Equity Partners, run by Richard Baker, then 39, a real estate investor who had never operated a department store in his life.
Baker’s method was not a secret: buy a retailer whose shares are priced on its sales and take possession of a property portfolio the market has forgotten to price. In 2006, NRDC had done this to Lord & Taylor. In 2008, it did it to Hudson’s Bay. For a while it was spectacular.
The company went public again in 2012. In 2013 it paid roughly $2. 5 billion for Saks Fifth Avenue. It bought Galeria Kaufhof in Germany.
In 2015, the online retailer Gilt. The trade that made his reputation came in January 2011. Target wanted into Canada and did not want to build. Hudson’s Bay sold it the leasehold interests on up to 220 Zellers stores for $1.
825 billion. It was by a wide margin the most profitable thing Zellers ever did, and Zellers did it by ceasing to exist. Target Canada opened, failed comprehensively, and closed in early 2015, leaving 133 stores, some 17,600 jobs, and a write-down of about $4. 1 billion.
The Bay had been paid in full and in cash. It had also handed away its position in nearly every suburban mall in the country, and there was no getting those back at any price. Then the company started selling the corners. In 2014, the Queen Street flagship in Toronto went to Cadillac Fairview for about $650 million, and the Bay stayed in it as a tenant.
In 2015, it put 10 properties into a joint venture with RioCan. When you sell the building your store sits in, you book an enormous gain in that year’s accounts and you agree to pay rent in every year that follows forever. The gain is a headline. The rent is permanent.
A retailer that owns its building can afford to be mediocre for a very long time. A retailer paying market rent on the best corner in downtown Toronto cannot. Shoppers described escalators taped off for months, whole departments dark, upper floors given over to almost nothing, staffing cut to the point where finding somebody to unlock a fitting room took 10 minutes. One line got repeated by landlords across the industry for years: a clever real estate investor and a terrible department store operator.
The property strategy had worked exactly as designed. What it had quietly removed was the one thing that had been letting the retail side survive being bad at retail. In March 2020, Baker took the company private at $11 a share. Within a fortnight, every store in Canada was shut by the pandemic.
What emerged on the other side was smaller and much quieter. The Winnipeg store, the 1926 limestone building with the Christmas windows, closed permanently on the 30th of November 2020 after 94 years. Edmonton’s downtown store closed in June 2021. The Hudson’s Bay Centre in Toronto closed in May 2022.
The flagships were not killed off. They were allowed to become unprofitable one at a time and then closed on schedule. Then the company did something nobody saw coming: it gave one of them away. In April 2022, it transferred the empty Winnipeg building to the Southern Chiefs’ Organization, which represents 34 Anishinaabe and Dakota nations in southern Manitoba, for no sale price.
The project is called Wehwehneh Bahgahkinahgohn, which in Ojibway means roughly “it is visible,” and the plan has grown to $130 million and beyond: 373 homes, 200 of them affordable and reserved for First Nations citizens, a health center practicing western and traditional medicine side by side, a child care center, an art gallery, a museum, a new seat of government, and a memorial to residential school survivors. Of all the great stone corners the company reserved for itself in 1869 and built on in 1913, the one it handed over for free is the only one whose future involves anybody living in it. There was one last era when the Bay was unambiguously the national store, and it ran on mittens. From Turin in 2006 through Tokyo in 2020, Hudson’s Bay dressed the Canadian team.
For Vancouver 2010, it produced a pair of red mittens with a white maple leaf across the palm, priced them at $10, and could not keep them on the shelves. More than three million pairs went in roughly four months in a country of 34 million people. Then on the 23rd of September 2021, the Canadian Olympic Committee announced it had signed Lululemon through the 2028 games. The oldest company on the continent had just lost the last contract that made it look like an institution.
The structural ending came in December 2024, from New York. Saks Global, the American arm Baker had built, acquired Neiman Marcus, and in the restructuring the Canadian business was carved out, separated, financed on its own standalone credit facilities. The deepest pockets in the structure were now on the far side of a legal wall. Going into 2025, the Canadian company was 80 department stores, three Saks Fifth Avenue locations, and 13 Saks Off 5th stores, a workforce of more than 9,000 people, an enormous amount of rent, and no parent under any obligation to write a check.
On the 7th of March 2025, Hudson’s Bay filed for protection under the Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act. The company had roughly $3 million in cash against roughly a billion dollars in secured debt and hundreds of millions more owed to suppliers, landlords, and tax authorities across some 400 creditors. It stated that without new financing, it would shortly be unable to make payroll. The court approved $16 million in emergency financing, and 17 bids came in for various pieces.
Not one of them was an offer to keep the stores open. On the 21st of March, a judge approved the liquidation of 74 of the 80 stores. The last months of the Hudson’s Bay Company were spent as a going-out-of-business sale. The good departments were picked clean inside a week, then came the strange slow part where the store began selling itself: racks, display cases, mannequins, the signage off the walls.
The striped goods, blankets, towels, anything carrying the four colors, were among the first things gone. More than 8,300 employees, 8,347 by the final count, were terminated. They received their accrued vacation pay. They did not receive severance, because severance owed to employees is an unsecured claim, standing behind the banks and the landlords in a queue that had already run out of money.
Their recourse was a federal program capped at $8,844 a person. Meanwhile, the court approved a retention package worth up to $3 million for the roughly 120 managers needed to run the wind-down. Many of the people let go had decades behind the same counter. They got their vacation pay.
The stores closed on the 1st of June 2025. Eighty Hudson’s Bay locations, three Saks Fifth Avenue, 13 Saks Off 5th, in a single day in every province the company operated in. 355 years, longer than Canada has existed by 188 years, longer than the United States by 106. Staff took photographs of each other at the tills.
In Vancouver, the Terra Cotta building at Granville and Georgia went dark. In Montreal, the old Morgan’s. In Toronto, the Queen Street store, which had only been a tenant of its own address for 11 years. Hudson’s Bay, the retailer, was liquidated.
Hudson’s Bay, the name, was not. In May 2025, Canadian Tire agreed to buy the intellectual property, the name, the coat of arms, the striped point blanket design, the private labels, for $30 million. Canadian Tire brought the stripes back in a small holiday capsule on the 5th of December 2025. The point blankets themselves are stocked but not put out on the shelf, kept in the back and brought out when somebody asks.
Through the summer and autumn of 2025, the company’s remaining assets were cataloged for sale, including the 1670 charter itself. The proposal to auction it produced the first genuine public outcry of the entire collapse, not over the stores, not over the 8,000 jobs, but over a document. Historians pointed out that it is effectively a founding record of the country. On the 21st of November, an Ontario judge approved the auction with an $18 million bid already in hand from the Thompson and Weston holding companies, who had committed in advance to donating it.
On the 3rd of December, nobody bid against them. The families added $5 million for preservation and consultation, and the charter went permanently and jointly to four institutions: the Archives of Manitoba, the Manitoba Museum, the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau, and the Royal Ontario Museum. Grand Chief Kyra Wilson of the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs put the question in public: where is the respect for the First Nations that charter affected so deeply, and why were they not consulted about what happens to it now? In Winnipeg, the 1926 building is still standing, wrapped in scaffolding and roughly a third finished, with completion slipped to 2028.
Inside, the limestone shell that held the elevator operators and the hair salon and the sixth floor restaurant is being cut into 373 apartments, 200 of them reserved for First Nations families. The company got that corner for nothing in 1869, built on it, ran it for 94 years, closed it, and then gave it away. It is the only one of the original six that anybody is going to live in.
And somewhere between the winter tires and the paint aisle, there was a stock room with a stack of point blankets in green, red, yellow, and indigo, waiting for somebody to come to the counter and ask for one.
