The end came a little bit early for the sprawling Hudson’s Bay Company store in downtown Ottawa on Sunday when the oldest company in North America stopped trading after 355 years.
At about 5 o’clock, I watched as the doors were locked about an hour ahead of schedule. There was little point in holding out for the final hour. Aside from heavily discounted jewelry, which was brought in for the liquidation sale, there was almost no merchandise left on the store’s five remaining sales floors. Earlier in the day, the leftovers had been priced at $1.
[Read: A 355-Year-Old Company That Once Owned One-Third of Canada Is Shutting Down]
The shoppers left inside after the doors had been locked consisted of a long line of jewelry buyers and a handful of people dithering about whether they really needed a mannequin or a store fixture.
My grandmother had a career selling women’s “foundation garments” at a department store (not the Bay), and before university, I sold cameras at a Simpsons store that was later absorbed into Hudson’s Bay. So I found it a melancholy scene.
But there was still some final levity. To the amusement of two plainclothes security guards — people once called floorwalkers — among the people rapping on the doors to be let in for a final visit was a woman they described as a “frequent flier,” a recidivist shoplifter.
While shopping at the Bay is over, much unfinished business remains.
While more than 8,000 employees will be left jobless and without severance pay, many of them are still working for a couple more weeks to clean up, help buyers remove fixtures and secure the final shutdown.
And the bankruptcy proceedings are still making their way through the courts.
Part of that involves a plan to raise even more money for the failed retailer’s creditors by auctioning about 4,400 artifacts and artworks.
Little is known exactly what those objects are except for one: the ornately embellished charter granted by King Charles II establishing the company and giving it about one-third of what’s now Canada — without compensating or consulting the Indigenous people who owned the land.
Between the 1970s and the 1990s, Hudson’s Bay transferred its archives to the Archives of Manitoba, the province where the company’s offices were long based.
But it held onto the charter. Leslie Weir, the librarian and archivist of Canada, told me that the company had clung to the idea that the centuries-old document was still an active corporate record, although that’s not an assessment she shares.
Indeed, when the company started bankruptcy proceedings, the filings were not made by the Governor and Company of Adventurers of England Trading Into Hudson’s Bay — its name in the charter — but by 13 contemporary corporate entities, most of them apparently holding companies.
Ms. Weir is among many archivists and historians who argue that the charter is too important a piece of Canadian history to allow it to continue to be held in private hands, as could be the case after an auction.
“It could be considered not only a founding document of H.B.C. but also a founding document of Canada,” she told me. “It should be cared for in a public institution that would ensure that the peoples in Canada are able to see and read it and understand exactly what was given to the Hudson’s Bay at that moment in time and then what impact it had, both on the First Nations and native people, but also on the settlers.”
Ms. Weir said that in Britain, the demise of Hudson’s Bay would make the royal charter property of the government again through the crown. But Canada, she said, has no such law. And all matters related to Hudson’s Bay were transferred to Canada by Britain after the relatively new nation closed a deal in 1870 to buy Rupert’s Land, the company’s territory, excluding it from Britain’s legislation.
The charter, Ms. Weir said, established Hudson’s Bay as much more than just a fur trading operation, noting that the company had made some of the first treaties with Indigenous people in what became Canada.
“It was definitely a colonial power, functioning side by side with Upper and Lower Canada and with the colonies in the Atlantic Provinces,” she said.
The potential sale of the other artifacts, even without public knowledge of what they are, has also raised concerns.
The Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs has called for a ban on the auctioning of any artifacts or art related to Indigenous people.
“These artifacts are not simply ‘valuable assets’ or one-of-a-kind collectibles, but pieces of living history, some of which may be sacred, stolen from First Nations or properly First Nations owned,” Chief Kyra Wilson wrote in a letter submitted to the Ontario Court of Justice. “Repatriating our cultural artifacts is about dignity, sovereignty and respect.”
After being asked if it intends to intervene, the Department of Canadian Heritage said on Friday night that it was monitoring the proposed auction.
“The department understands that some of these items may be of great significance to Canadians,” it wrote.
Fire Watch
Evacuations from areas menaced by wildfires have forced about 17,000 people to leave their communities in Manitoba, along with 15,000 more in Saskatchewan. We are regularly updating the situation with the out-of-control blazes.
Smoke from more than 200 fires, mainly in the prairies, is now blanketing much of Ontario, Quebec and Atlantic Canada. The Times’s smoke forecast includes Canada.
Trans Canada
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Prime Minister Mark Carney has elevated the elimination of interprovincial trade barriers to the top of his political agenda. My colleague Norimitsu Onishi tells the story of Gerard Comeau, a retired utility lineman in New Brunswick, whose run to Quebec for cheap beer 13 year ago ended up in the Supreme Court and brought widespread attention to trade barriers between provinces.
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For The New York Times Magazine, Katie Engelhart followed the journey of Paula Ritchie of Smiths Falls, Ontario, who sought medical assistance in dying after a concussion had led to dizziness and insomnia and unending pain. Katie’s nuanced portrait also looks at the bioethics around such assistance for people who are suffering but not imminently likely to die.
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Elaine Glusac, the Frugal Traveler columnist, proposes five Canadian alternatives to U.S. national parks.
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President Trump doubled tariffs on Canadian aluminum and steel to 50 percent, a move that some believe may effectively close the American market to producers in Canada. And in April, Canada posted a record trade deficit, mostly because of U.S. tariffs, which prompted a dramatic fall in auto exports. Mr. Trump vowed in April to make 90 new trade deals in 90 days. Christine Zhang reports that after two-thirds of that period, he may have one.
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Marc Garneau, the first Canadian astronaut and later a federal cabinet minister, has died at 76.
Ian Austen reports on Canada for The Times based in Ottawa. He covers politics, culture and the people of Canada and has reported on the country for two decades. He can be reached at [email protected].
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Ian Austen reports on Canada for The Times based in Ottawa. He covers politics, culture and the people of Canada and has reported on the country for two decades. He can be reached at [email protected].
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