The Battle for the Bay

In 1670, when King Charles II incorporated the Hudson’s Bay Company (originally and convolutedly known as the Governor and Company of Adventurers of England Trading Into Hudson’s Bay), he founded a mercantile empire that would stretch across more than one-third of what is now Canada. Over the next three centuries, the Bay morphed from a trading empire into a retail one, with a constellation of 101 stores across the country at its height and a signature striped blanket as iconic as maple syrup and hockey.

Over the past year, the future of the Bay and whatever it means to Canada—if anything—has been decided minute by minute. After filing for creditor protection in March, the company has steadily liquidated its assets to pay down a black hole of debt totalling roughly $1 billion. When the flagship location at Yonge and Queen permanently closed its doors at the beginning of June, even the mannequins were up for grabs, with shoppers spiriting them away like department-store grave robbers. Two months later, Canadian Tire purchased intellectual property rights to the Bay’s legendary name for $30 million.

Related: Inside the last day of Hudson’s Bay’s Toronto flagship

In November, Heffel, the fine-art auction house in Yorkville, started offloading the Bay’s 1,700-piece collection, including a portrait of British naval commander Lord Nelson that fetched $121,500; multiple romanticized depictions of the Bay’s colonial history (one of voyageurs braving wild rapids went for $361,250); and a landscape by Winston Churchill, the most valuable piece in the collection, which sold for nearly $1.6 million.

How the country’s largest department store came to such a bitter end is a tortured affair framed by hubris and greed. It’s the story of loyal employees fighting to keep the lights on while an American owner stripped the company for parts, of landlords fending off a Hail Mary offer from an eccentric Chinese billionaire and of wealthy Toronto dynasties jockeying for the company’s charter.

There was a time, before outlet malls took over the suburbs, when to go shopping was to go downtown, and to go downtown was to go to the Bay. It had everything: toasters and Le Creuset kitchenware, boxed WonderBras and designer dresses, percale sheets and mahogany bedroom sets. Impeccably trained salespeople would shepherd customers between the aisles, guiding them through their options. In addition to stores, the Hudson’s Bay Company also owned fur auction houses, oil-and-gas companies, financial services, a distillery and other interests. With business booming, everyone wanted in.

Related: These paintings being auctioned off by the Hudson’s Bay Company will incite bidding wars

In 1979, HBC was at the centre of a turf war between two of Canada’s richest families, the Thomsons and the Westons. The Thomsons had risen under pater­familias Roy (after whom the concert hall was named), a newspaper magnate who expanded his holdings into the UK in the 1950s and was granted the peerage Baron Thomson of Fleet. Meanwhile, Garfield Weston was busy transforming a Toronto bakery into a multinational supermarket chain. By the mid-1970s, their respective sons—Kenneth Thomson and Galen Weston Sr.—were looking for opportunities to expand the family empires. Thomson moved first. In March of 1979, he offered HBC shareholders $365.8 million for 51 per cent of the company. A month later, Weston countered with a $468-­million offer. Dubbed the “Store Wars” by the media, the fight came to an end with Thomson’s winning salvo: $640 million for 75 per cent of the company’s shares.

Thomson may have emerged the victor, but his new company, which had acquired the department store chain Simpsons the previous year, was saddled with long-term debt of roughly $1 billion. The financials went from bad to catastrophic when Canada plunged into a recession, sending interest rates soaring to 21 per cent. In 1981, HBC’s profits totalled just $3.7 million, $76 million less than when Thomson bought the company, and it lost an additional $223 million over the next five years. “I had hoped it would be a good investment for the family,” said Thomson at the time. “So far it hasn’t worked out that way.”

To keep the company afloat, Thomson threw all non-department-store holdings overboard. Between 1982 and 1989, he sold HBC’s oil-and-gas companies, its travel agency, its distillery and its financial services firms. He also excised what many considered the company’s soul: its fabled fur auction houses and 178 northern posts, essentially abandoning the Bay’s legacy. The timing could not have been worse. HBC put all its eggs in the department store basket just as Walmart and other US competitors started pushing into Canada. By 1997, tired of fending off cascading disasters, Thomson sold his shares.

Related: Billionaire David Thomson wants to outbid Galen Weston for the Hudson’s Bay charter

Sales continued to decline through the aughts as the digital revolution further decimated traditional retail. By 2005, the company was looking for a buyer, and it found one in Jerry Zucker, an American billionaire who already held an 18.8 per cent stake in HBC. He secured the rest of the company for $1.1 billion in 2006 but didn’t get to enjoy it for long—two years later, he died of cancer.

Within months, Zucker’s widow sold HBC to American real estate mogul Richard Baker for $1.1 billion. The son of a retail property magnate, Baker—who declined to be interviewed for this piece—was born in 1965 in New York, raised in Connecticut and brought into the family business early. Dinner-table conversations revolved around loan collateral, and a teenage Baker would accompany his father on tours of malls around the US. His first feat, in 1991, was persuading the nascent Walmart to expand into the northeastern US, as an anchor tenant in his family’s malls.

As a businessman, Baker had an unconventional streak: he used the phrase “pretty neat” to describe billion-dollar real estate deals and brought his Maltese dogs, Ruby and Bella, to meetings. The HBC deal came around in part because Baker was enamoured of the vision of Canada the company so expertly served up: soaring mountains, crystalline lakes, untamed lands. He was an American seduced by a northern dream—one uncomplicated by the legacy of colonialism or Indigenous land claims or all the other real-world considerations the company had chosen to sidestep.

Baker invested heavily in HBC, breaking it out of its rough patch. In August of 2008, one month after buying the company, he hired a new president and CEO, Bonnie Brooks, an experienced Canadian retail executive fresh off a stint leading Hong Kong’s Lane Crawford Joyce Group, where she had brought Western high fashion to 500 stores across Asia. Chic and stylish, with a hands-on management style, Brooks was after cosmopolitan shoppers with expensive tastes and disposable income to match. And she had a plan to get them: a high-end boutique within the Bay, a reinvention of the St. Regis Room that had been launched by Simpsons in the 1930s.

Related: “The whole store erupted in cheers”—This couple got engaged on the last day of the Bay’s liquidation sale

To get the hottest brands into the Room, as it had been officially christened, Brooks needed a hotshot buyer and creative director. She had been impressed by Nicholas Mellamphy’s Yorkville boutique, Hazel, and set up a meeting with him for January of 2009. Mellamphy arrived at HBC’s head office on Bay Street early, wiping slush from his suit after falling into a snowbank. When Brooks entered the main boardroom, Mellamphy was sitting at the enormous table, surrounded by portraits of the company’s past governors. She asked if he’d heard of the St. Regis Room. He had—he’d even prepared a vision book for an updated version of it, and he handed its pages over to Brooks. She had found her man.

With Mellamphy on board, Brooks turned the Room into a fashion nirvana. She hired design firm Yabu Pushelberg and committed $4.4 million to renovating and expanding the space, where VIP customers, which came to include Suzanne Rogers and Vonna Bitove, could avail themselves of 21,500 square feet of luxury with a full-time concierge, a VIP lounge and champagne-stocked fridges. ­Mellamphy, meanwhile, flew to New York, London, Paris and Milan to woo the best brands in fashion. One buy included $4,300 Swarovski-encrusted dresses by Canadian designer Mark Fast. Fashion bloggers were modelling the Bay stripes from Brooklyn to Tokyo, and in 2010 came another coup: Sarah Jessica Parker chose to launch her Halston Heritage label at the Toronto flagship with a $200,000 party. No one was more thrilled than Baker, who had taken to his new role with enthusiasm. “He was full of energy and very supportive,” says Mellamphy. “He would walk around the store in his beautifully tailored suits, delighted at what was being created. I remember introducing him to one of my clients, a movie star, and he was so personable—exactly who you wanted people interacting with.”

Along with the rise of the Room, Brooks was bringing HBC back to its roots. As a hat tip to the company’s history, she gave department heads new titles: chief adventurer of writing, chief beauty adventurer. In 2010, the company was the official clothing and merchandise retailer for the Vancouver Olympics, having scooped the contract from Roots, and it sold 3.5 million pairs of maple leaf–emblazoned mittens in the months leading up to and during the games. The era of the artisanal lumber­jack followed, when urban men traded their Harry Rosen polos and taper cuts for red flannel and man buns—a heritage-focused trend the company could easily lean into.

HBC was back in the black: in 2011, the company posted an operating profit of $57.3 million on $3.8 billion in retail sales, a dramatic turnaround from its $159.7-million loss in 2009. Baker was ready for the next step. At a retreat for upper management in 2012, he gathered the department heads and stepped out dressed like Willy Wonka. “I’m going to make all of your dreams come true,” he declared, instructing them to look under their seats. There, they each found a golden ticket, and on it, stock options. Baker was taking the company public.

HBC’s IPO closed that November, bringing in $365 million. Now responsible to shareholders less enamoured of the brand than Baker was, the Canadian leadership felt a seismic shift. Baker began to involve more Americans in running the company. To form so-called centres of excellence, he brought in executives from Lord and Taylor, which his company had scooped up for $1.36 billion in 2006, and Saks Fifth Avenue, which he’d acquired in 2013 for just over $3 billion—a purchase fêted by Anna Wintour with a party thrown in Baker’s honour at Paris Fashion Week.

Going public seemed like the right move: retail sales nearly tripled to $14.5 billion over the next three years. HBC was once again a multi-headed hydra, its holdings comprising the Bay; Lord and Taylor; Saks Fifth Avenue and its discount arm, Saks Off 5th; Home Outfitters; and two Zellers clearance centres. Yet, just as business was surging, Baker started selling off HBC’s real estate holdings. First, he sold the flagship store and office tower in Toronto to landlords Cadillac Fairview for $650 million, immediately leasing them back. Then, in 2015, he sold a stake in 10 of the Bay’s department store leases to the real estate investment trust RioCan for $325 million. Observers began to wonder if Baker was more interested in the value of the land upon which the department stores sat than in the Bay brand itself.

Baker’s next move was to expand Saks into Canada. Claiming that a new luxury fashion space would overshadow the Room, corporate slashed Mellamphy’s budget by $10 million. By 2017, Saks’s revenue was climbing steadily while the Bay and the rest of Baker’s brands were on the decline. Disillusioned that the company had abandoned a vision he had worked so hard to support, Mellamphy quit.

All the while, a monster was lurking. Amazon had launched as an on-line bookstore in 1995 and steadily diversified, stealing away large parts of the retail business. Customers who didn’t really need to try on that blouse or check out that stand mixer before buying were shopping from their laptops and smartphones, and by 2018, Amazon was generating an annual revenue of $235 billion. Meanwhile, HBC—teetering on a shaky foundation of brick-and-mortar retail brands—was hemorrhaging money: it lost $984 million in the spring and summer of 2019 alone. In early 2020, in desperate need of a turnaround, Baker took the company private once more. Days later, the first Covid lockdowns hit.

Across the country, the Bay’s stores went dark, and the company scrambled to find a new revenue stream. In 2021, it went on a $130-million digital expansion spree, hiring 500 corporate employees for a major pivot to online. As reported by the Toronto Star, Baker appeared in a company-wide Zoom call that March, flanked by his dogs and dressed in a camo T-shirt, with the theme from Game of Thrones playing in the background. “We are at war,” he proclaimed, “and we are going to win.” Translation: he had struck a $500-million deal with private investors to separate Saks.com, which was bringing in roughly $1.2 billion in annual sales, from Saks Fifth Avenue. The funds would form a “war chest” to push for dominance in US retail. Emboldened, he performed a similar trick with TheBay.com a few months later, dividing the company into two separate businesses on the gamble that investors scared off by physical retail would readily invest in an e-commerce brand.

It was a big swing but ultimately a miss. Glitchy and cumbersome, TheBay.com turned healthy profits during the most desperate months of the pandemic, but when lockdowns were lifted, sales plunged roughly 40 per cent below what the company had forecasted. The right hand of the newly severed business wasn’t talking to the left—they over-bought inventory and doubled up on work, compounding losses. A year later, the company was forced to glue its two halves back together to survive.

By 2023, Baker appeared to have lost interest in his Canadian department stores. Operating budgets were slashed and turnover skyrocketed. When asked by the Globe and Mail how much of HBC’s business the stores represented, Baker held his thumb and forefinger an inch apart and said, “A teeny-weeny, tiny bit.” HBC, he explained, was better thought of as an investment company—but one he was committed to for the long term: “I plan on being the governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company until the day they put me in the ground.”

Meanwhile, foot traffic downtown plummeted, as did the demand for workwear, and according to one former executive, Baker was frustrated that the government hadn’t done enough to encourage employees to head back to the office. To make matters worse, construction on the Ontario Line closed Queen Street to vehicles between Yonge and Bay that May, complicating access to the store for the dwindling number of shoppers who wanted to go there. Baker’s investments were hurting. As far as he was concerned, Canadians were to blame.

Rolling layoffs took place throughout the year. Meetings would suddenly pop up in employees’ calendars to announce another round of cuts. CEO Liz Rodbell—who had replaced Bonnie Brooks as president in 2013, when Brooks became vice-chair—would appear onscreen to drop bad news like a bomb before abruptly disconnecting. Staffers began obsessively checking Slack to see whose icons had gone grey, a silent death notice. Productivity took a nosedive, as did morale.

HBC was missing payments to suppliers, who were understandably irate, and the company’s besieged employees were stuck dealing with the fallout. At one town hall, Baker spoke tersely: it was everyone’s responsibility to shoulder the economic burdens facing retail, he said, vendors included. At one point, the Bay owed tens of thousands of dollars to its website provider, which had run out of patience. TheBay.com was hours from going down, and employees scrambled to create a backup using an off-the-shelf website builder.

Management pressured the marketing team to keep new campaigns going in the hope that a surge in sales would somehow save the Bay. A company credit card—the only source of funds to pay models and other contractors at the time—was cut off in the middle of a shoot. Rodbell ended up proffering her own card to cover the bill.

Troubles abounded in the summer of 2024, not the least of which involved the Bay’s aging HVAC systems. The air conditioners in many of the stores were decades old and on hot days simply stopped working, sending internal temperatures soaring above 30 degrees. That August, Rodbell announced that employees would be taking the next six Fridays off, unpaid, so the company could gather the cash necessary to repair its cooling systems.

Matters never improved—far from it. HBC lost roughly $330 million throughout 2024, and Baker, it seemed, was looking for an emergency exit. That December, he finalized a deal to have HBC buy Neiman Marcus and promptly spun it and HBC’s other US assets off as a new company, Saks Global—turning HBC into a purely Canadian-­based entity. Less than four months later, out of money and hounded by lenders, HBC filed for creditor protection. It was now up to the lawyers to salvage whatever was left—a Herculean task when outstanding accounts totalled almost $1 billion and HBC had 1,889 creditors, including landlords such as Cadillac Fairview, Oxford Properties, Ivanhoé Cambridge and KingSett Capital. In April of 2025, staff across the country were told that HBC was winding down operations. The 8,000-plus employees laid off over the next month exited without severance pay, a result of the company’s credit protection suit.

Some of what was left: the IP for the Bay and Zellers, the art collection, the royal charter that had established the company, the leases for the Bay’s stores and warehouses, inventory bits and bobs, and a collection of knick-knacks from Christmas displays past. By far the most valuable assets were the Bay’s leases, many of which had been negotiated half a century earlier, when the department store made the mall. Perks for those anchor tenants often included below-market rent and the ability to extend their leases decades into the future. The court allowed HBC to start taking bids on lease takeovers, with the deadline for offers set as early as May 1. When that day came, there were a dozen bidders for 39 of HBC’s 99 leases—and one clear front runner.

Weihong “Ruby” Liu’s life is, by her own account, a classic rags-to-riches story. She was born in Harbin, China, in 1966, to parents fleeing famine elsewhere in the country. To help with the family’s finances, she dropped out of school at 16 and started a wholesale business peddling clothing and other goods. Six years later, she sold it for enough to buy a small apartment in Shenzhen. Then she opened a convenience store, then multiple restaurants, until finally she got into commercial real estate. In 2002, she invested in a major shopping mall in the city, which she later sold for $1.32 billion.

Related: A billionaire from China now owns 28 Hudson’s Bay leases. But what about the Toronto flagship?

In 2014, Liu relocated to the Vancouver area after a controversy involving leasing and purchasing practices at one of her Shenzhen shopping malls—and allegations that she’d punched a journalist reporting on the story. Once in BC, Liu opened a golf course and three major shopping centres, each of which housed either a Bay store or a Saks Off 5th. When HBC was soliciting bids for its leases, she put in an offer of $69 million for 28 of them—including the three in her Vancouver malls, plus Sherway Gardens and Fairview mall in Toronto. To the bankrupt HBC, her offer was irresistible. It quickly agreed to the sale.

Liu approached her takeover like an influencer building a following. In one video, posted on TikTok and the social media app Xiaohongshu, known as RedNote, in April, she appears before a whiteboard outlining her plan to acquire the Bay. In another RedNote video posted in May, she holds a piece of paper with “Liu” and “New Bay” in English and says in Mandarin, “When you see this logo, you’ll know it’s my mall.”

It was through these posts that the executives of Cadillac Fairview discovered Liu was angling to be their tenant. On May 23, the landlords saw a video on RedNote showing Liu and her team sipping champagne as they signed a contract with HBC’s financial adviser and real estate broker for the leases. A lawyer for Cadillac Fairview immediately reached out to HBC’s legal counsel only to be rebuffed with a note punting their concerns to a future date. “There was no need for you to be surfing Chinese social media on a Friday night,” HBC’s lawyers responded. “Have a nice weekend.”

Liu’s idea was to create a mini mall within each Bay store—a concept similar to certain types of large stores in Asia. Not merely shopping centres, they trade in hospitality, entertainment, dining and experiences, with an ever-changing core that hosts rolling pop-ups. There were some problems with this, namely that mall owners wouldn’t appreciate Liu eating their lunch. Why, when the landlords already operated a mall with a food court, movie theatres, stores and restaurants, would they want her doing all the same things in her own private space, effectively stealing their other tenants’ business? Key financial details were also missing. While Liu seemed keen to workshop her big idea on social media, her calculations didn’t make any sense.

The ill-defined business plan proved to be a big problem. HBC couldn’t unilaterally sell the leases: it needed the court’s approval and that of the landlords, who were adamantly opposed to Liu’s bids. They had just written down more than $3.4 million in unpaid rent from the Bay. If anyone was going to take the leases over, it would have to be a major business with ironclad financials and existing locations that the executives could inspect. Liu’s pitch—a vague allusion to mall-like elements—was not that. The landlords made no effort to disguise their contempt: a letter sent to Liu’s lawyer by KingSett Capital’s legal representation concluded with, “Hope is not a business plan.”

For the landlords, the big empty spaces the Bay left behind constituted a dozen different opportunities. They could be chopped up into areas for entertainment and experiences and smaller shops and stores—similar to Liu’s idea, yet in concert with the rest of the mall. Or, better yet, they could be torn down and used as the footprints for residential towers, whose inhabitants would form a built-in customer base for the mall under their feet. Like Baker before them, the landlords saw the Bay for what it was: a real estate gold mine.

In late May, Liu had a video call with HBC’s financial and legal advisers, who urged her to firm up her plan for the Bay. Meetings were set for the following week with eight of the landlords, and she would need to convince them that she knew what she was doing. Liu shrugged, telling the advisers to “relax and lay back.” On June 2, she arrived at the Stikeman Elliott offices for a meeting with Cadillac Fairview’s president and CEO, Sal Iacono, and head of operations, Rory MacLeod. The executives hoped this would be their chance to finally see what Liu had in mind, but when they sat down, she had nothing to show them. She offered promises about respecting the leases, then tossed around ideas involving children’s playgrounds, flashing lights and even an Eataly, with Cadillac Fairview shouldering half the cost.

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Ten minutes in, the Cadillac Fairview team had heard enough and stood to leave. Ruby Liu jumped up to keep them from departing

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It was like watching an improv performance. Ten minutes in, the Cadillac Fairview team had heard enough and stood to leave. Liu jumped up to keep them from departing, asking if there had been a misunderstanding. “Stay—we should talk about other things, like golf,” one of their lawyers recalls Liu saying. Over the next few days, Liu’s team repeatedly requested another meeting, without success. They sent Cadillac Fairview a letter promising that Liu would open her stores within 180 days and achieve the Bay’s peak operating revenue of more than $400 million in her first year.

Liu’s meetings with the other landlords weren’t going any better. By mid-June, seven of the nine had officially opposed her bid. A few weeks after that, even HBC had had enough. In an exasperated letter to Liu, they questioned why, given the scope of her potential investment, she hadn’t spent the money required to create a credible business plan. HBC gave Liu an ultimatum: hire former CEO Liz ­Rodbell as a consultant, KPMG as a financial adviser and the firm Miller Thomson to revisit the business plan, or they would void her bid. And if she did as asked, they would knock $3 million off the purchase price. It was a bluff, and Liu didn’t bite. She hired new business lawyers but didn’t take on Miller Thomson, KPMG or Rodbell. She was focused on a different approach: buttering up the judge. On July 9, she sent Peter Osborne, who was presiding over HBC’s liquidation, a personal letter. “The first moment I saw you, I felt an unshakable belief that you were a person of justice and strength,” she wrote. “Is this what I have read of in books—true nobility?… Or is there also a silent sorrow in your heart at the compromises this world demands?” The next day, she sent him another note saying that the landlords had “allied together to bypass court procedures” and “schemed together to regain the leases for nothing.” Even if her business plan had been perfect, nothing would have convinced them, she claimed.

In mid-July, Liu arrived at a court hearing without a lawyer, intending to represent herself and use one of her employees to translate. Osborne urged her to get legal representation, then reprimanded her for sending him the letters. Now that Liu had alienated the court, the landlords and HBC itself, her ambitions started to seem downright delusional. A few days later, she held a job fair in Toronto to hire for her non-existent retail company.

At the end of the month, the court handed over six leases to two other buyers who had submitted competent bids. And in the fall, it finally decided what to do with Liu. On October 24, the court denied HBC’s sale of the leases to Liu (with the exception of the three in her own malls) and began making plans to hand the remaining 25 back to their landlords to do with as they pleased. With that decision, there was no longer anything linking those empty spaces, those old trading posts. A great thread stretching across the country had snapped.

While Liu was tussling with property barons, two of the country’s richest families were fighting over the Bay’s oldest document. When the British Crown signed HBC’s charter in 1670, it bestowed the rights to an immense swath of territory, one of the largest land grants in history from a suzerain to a subject. In theory, it established a trading company bigger than the Holy Roman Empire—a feat flicked at by author Peter C. Newman in his three-part history of the company, when he calls its governors “Caesars of the wilderness.”

For decades, the charter sat in a glass case outside HBC’s main boardroom at Yonge and Queen, largely ignored by executives as they came and went from meetings. Early in HBC’s liquidation proceedings, the court agreed that the charter and the art collection should be sold at auction, with the proceeds going toward HBC’s debts. The auction process was a fitting nod to the company’s mercantile past, but then, in mid-June, HBC received an unsolicited offer of $12.5 million. The Weston family, now headed by Galen Weston Jr., wanted to buy the charter and donate it to the Canadian Museum of History, in Gatineau, Quebec.

HBC promptly withdrew the charter from auction and went about finalizing the sale—that is, until another offer landed in August, this time from a company tied to David Thomson. The Third Baron of Fleet, son of Kenneth, objected to the private sale to the Westons. He instead agitated for the previously planned public auction, which he promised to kick off with a $15-million bid. If he won, Thomson intended to donate the charter to the Archives of Manitoba, already the holder of many of the Bay’s historical documents.

Four and a half decades after their brawl over the Bay, the Westons and the Thomsons were at it again. This time, the families were competing for the honour of throwing millions of dollars at a document they would immediately hand over to someone else. As a Globe and Mail editorial noted in August, the “unseemly backroom deal” proposed by Weston bore a certain resemblance to the charter’s birth, having been conjured into being by a select elite. And on his end, by setting the opening bid at an astronomical $15 million, Thomson had devised a competition few others could hope to win.

HBC, seeking to secure the greatest amount possible, favoured Thomson’s proposal. The charter was going to auction—until, in late September, another plot twist: at the court hearing meant to kick off the auction process, HBC’s lawyers immediately requested a pause. They had received a late-breaking bid and needed time to assess it. They didn’t say who wanted the charter, how much they were offering or what they planned to do with it if they won. Nearly seven weeks went by without any further details, the name of the mystery bidder kept secret.

Then came unexpected news of a deal between the Westons and the Thomsons—a royal marriage of sorts. The families had conjured a joint bid of $18 million, plus a $5-million contribution to four museums that would share custody of the artifact—the Canadian Museum of History, the Archives of Manitoba, the Manitoba Museum and the Royal Ontario Museum—to help preserve it, keep it publicly accessible and support educational initiatives around it. The funds would also be used to engage First Nations, Métis and Inuit communities in guiding the process. In keeping with Thomson’s original proposal, the charter’s official home would be Manitoba, the province it had helped found. The court scheduled the auction for no later than December 3 and set the minimum bid at $18.5 million. With two of Canada’s most powerful families working together, the auction was now a formality. By early December, the charter was theirs to donate.

It took only nine months for a 355-year-old Canadian institution to evaporate. Its vanishing act transpired during an explosion of nationalism, after our identity and sovereignty came under threat from our closest ally. Yet that flag-waving fervour hasn’t extended to include a collective mourning of the Bay, a company whose decimation was expedited by an American. Instead, Canadians packed into stores to take advantage of slashed prices and watched the spectacle of signs and logos being stripped from buildings. The Bay’s end was gory and public, but did anyone truly care?

One of the oil paintings auctioned by Heffel this fall depicts a grizzled fur trader hammering a sign onto a pine in a mountain valley, claiming it for the Hudson’s Bay Company and the British Crown. When he painted it, in 1929, the artist, John Innes, would have believed this a moment worth celebrating—likely without a thought for the Indigenous inhabitants of all that land. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s final report, released in 2015, has only begun to sink into the country’s psyche in recent years, well after the Bay’s resurgence in the late aughts. Colonialism, residential schools and cultural genocide weren’t a consideration for the brand even 15 years ago, but looking back, they should have been. We haven’t been voyageurs for a long time. And the Canada that the Bay stood for is not the Canada we are currently defending.

This story appears in the January 2026 issue of Toronto Life magazine. To subscribe, click here. To purchase single issues, click here.