On December 3, 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 had 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 stripes had already been sold to someone else for $30 million.
The auction took about as long as it takes to read that sentence. Held in the offices of Stikeman Elliott, the law firm that had spent the previous nine months taking Hudson’s Bay Company apart one asset at a time, the lot was a single item: five sheets of vellum, stretched and 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 May 2, 1670. It carried the signature of Charles II, and it was a large part of the reason the country between the Great Lakes and the Rockies is shaped the way it is.
What the king signed away that morning, 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 and granted that company exclusive trade over every river and stream that drained into Hudson Bay. Nobody in London knew where those rivers ran. In practice, the grant covered about 3.
86 million square kilometers, 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 had spent the English Civil War charging at people and who never once traveled to the territory that bore his name for the next 200 years. From its first minute, it was a business dealing in land it had not visited, granted by a man who had not seen it, over people who had not been asked.
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 come back with a conclusion their own government refused to hear. The French carried furs out overland by canoe hundreds of miles 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 the country around the great inland sea to the north.
Sail into that sea, and the ships could come to the furs instead. 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. 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 1780s, did the opposite. It pushed inland, built posts up every river, and met the trappers long before the trappers got anywhere near a Hudson’s Bay factory. What followed 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 June 19, 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 its monopoly was govern for nearly 40 years. The man running the territory on the ground was George Simpson, a Scot who had arrived in 1820 and was handed the northern department the year the merger went through. He was not a fur trader by temperament.
He was an auditor with an empire, and the first thing he did was cut. By 1825 he had reduced the company’s staff by more than half, cut the wages of most of what remained, and closed every post the merger had made redundant. Then he spent the next three decades traveling the country to inspect what was left 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 that everybody inside had time to stand up straight before he stepped ashore.
The men called him the Little Emperor. He was also, for every practical purpose, the government of a third of a continent, and nobody had elected him to anything. And then the company sold the whole thing. In 1869, the new Dominion of Canada wanted the West, and the company, which had spent two centuries functioning as its government, agreed to hand it over.
The deed of surrender was signed on November 19. The price was £300,000 for a territory the size of India. It remains the largest transfer of land by area in Canadian history. On the face of it, the company had just liquidated itself for a rounding error, except the deed had terms.
The company kept every one of its trading posts and the ground immediately around them. And it kept one-twentieth of all the arable land in the fertile belt, the good farmland settlers were about to pour into by the hundreds of thousands. It gave up the empire and kept the corners. 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 along the Assiniboine and the Red, and nobody had asked them anything at all. Surveyors appeared. Louis Riel and a provisional government stopped them, turned the incoming lieutenant governor back at the border, and negotiated the terms that became the Manitoba Act. 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 a dozen years earlier. It already owned the best block in a dozen new cities.
All it had to do was put a building on it. In 1913, it committed to six at once: Calgary, Edmonton, Vancouver, Victoria, Winnipeg, and Saskatoon. Grand stone department stores on prime downtown corners, the kind 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. For most of the 20th century, the company simply bought whatever else the country had: Morgan’s in Montreal in 1960, Freiman’s in Ottawa in 1972, Zellers and Simpsons in 1978, 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.
It had been in continuous operation for 330 years. Then the first real warning came from the competition, and nobody read it as one. 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, and the sale made national news for one reason: after 336 years, the Hudson’s Bay Company was foreign-owned. Zucker applied for Canadian citizenship and received it, then died of brain cancer in April 2008 at 58. His family sold.
The buyer was an American private equity firm called NRDC Equity Partners, run by Richard Baker, then 39, the son of a shopping mall developer from Greenwich, Connecticut. He had trained in real estate, not retail. 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 at all.
The logic was sound, and 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, bought Galeria Kaufhof in Germany, and in 2015, the online retailer Gilt.
On paper, Baker had assembled a transatlantic department store empire in seven years. 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, paid in two installments. It was by a wide margin the most profitable thing Zellers ever did, and Zellers did it by ceasing to exist. Then Target Canada opened and failed so comprehensively that it is now taught in business schools. It closed in early 2015, 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. And the sales floors were in no condition to earn it.
Shoppers described escalators taped off for months, whole departments dark, staffing cut to the point where finding somebody to unlock a fitting room took ten minutes. In March 2020, Baker took the company private, buying out public shareholders at $11 a share. The deal closed on March 3. 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 November 30, 2020, after 94 years. Edmonton’s downtown store closed in June 2021. The Hudson’s Bay Centre in Toronto closed in May 2022.
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, representing 34 Anishinaabe and Dakota nations in southern Manitoba, for nothing, no sale price. The project is called Wehwehneh Bahgahkinahgohn, which in Ojibway means roughly “it is visible. ” 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 childcare center, an art gallery, a museum, and a memorial to residential school survivors.
It is running late; completion has slipped to 2028. There was one last era when the bay was unambiguously the national store, and it ran on mittens. From the Turin games 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 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 September 23, 2021, the Canadian Olympic Committee announced it had signed Lululemon. 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, left standing by itself. The Canadian company going into 2025 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. It had ten weeks left. On March 7, 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. On March 21, 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. More than 8,300 employees, 8,347 by the final count, close to 90 percent of the workforce, were terminated.
They received their accrued vacation pay. They did not receive severance, because severance owed to employees is an unsecured claim, and unsecured claims stand behind the banks and the landlords in a queue that had already run out of money. The stores closed on June 1, 2025: 80 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, longer than the United States by 106, and older than the Bank of England.
Then came the strangest chapter. A billionaire named Ruby Lou, who through her company Central Walk owned three shopping malls in British Columbia, offered $69. 1 million for 28 of the empty bay leases, intending to open department stores under her own banner. In July, a judge approved three of the leases, the ones in malls she already owned.
The remaining 25 sat in malls belonging to other people, and those landlords refused. In October 2025, Justice Peter Osborne ruled that landlords could not be compelled to accept her as a tenant. There was no evidence of an experienced team behind her, and the chief executive she had appointed had no experience running a department store. The judge used the word “startling.
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The brand went somewhere else entirely. 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.
$30 million for 355 years of brand recognition. Canadian Tire brought the stripes back in a small holiday capsule on December 5, 2025, then launched a full 32-piece Hudson’s Bay Stripes collection in May 2026. And then there was the parchment. 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. On November 21, an Ontario judge approved the auction with an $18 million bid already in hand from the Thompson and Weston holding companies, who had committed to donating it. On December 3, 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 had put the question in public while the sale was being arranged: 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? Moving it was a genuinely delicate operation. Vellum is skin, and 355 years of it does not enjoy being handled. The great seal is wax and will crack if it swings.
Conservators built a case, controlled the humidity, and moved five sheets of animal hide across Ontario at roughly the pace you would move an unexploded bomb. It was the document that granted a private company exclusive commercial rights over the drainage basin of an inland sea, that made a prince the governor of land he never saw, that set the price of a musket at ten beaver, that reserved the corners in 1869 and put six stone department stores on them in 1913. It had just turned out to be the single most valuable object its owner had left: $18 million, more than half again what the entire brand had fetched.
The 1670 charter that had never been seen by the man who signed it changed hands for the third time, and the consultation was scheduled for afterwards.