The slow and painful death of the Hudson's Bay Company

While my Globe & Mail today was mostly saturated with Trump tariff hysteria, they did find the space to inform me that our beloved Hudson’s Bay Company was filing for bankruptcy protection. How sad, I thought. I was aware the company had fallen into the clutches of American hedge fund billionaires some years ago, but I still saw it as Canadian. Turns out the only time this almost 500 year old company actually had Canadian ownership was for a few years after Canadian billionaire Ken Thomson, also known as Baron Thomson of Fleet, bought it in 1979. According to Wikipedia, Thomson bought the company for $400 million, sold off the oil and gas assets for $550 millions, and eventually sold on what was left to US billionaire Jerry Zucker for a billion! That’s a pretty sweet return on investment! Far from being a Canadian company, two hundred years older than the country itself, HBC was a tool of British colonialism, and a very effective one. In the 1800s the HBC trading posts formed a network that extended as far south as San Francisco. They even had an outpost in Hawaii. They actively discouraged settlement in the northwest, fearing it would interfere with their lucrative fur trade. That changed when HBC was sold to the International Financial Society, a consortium of London bankers, in 1863. Many of London’s banking houses were neck-deep in the promotion of railroad stock, and they saw the potential in the vast land holdings of HBC. Thereafter, the company became aggressively pro-settlement, because you don’t need railroads without a population. Among the bankers was Richard Potter, father of Beatrice, whose bank eventually evolved into the JP Morgan we all know and love today. Not that they didn’t continue the fur trade. In the 1920s the famous Doctor Frederick Banting, and his good friend, the painter A.Y. Jackson, did a tour of the far north and were disgusted by the company’s treatment of the indigenous population. Outraged, Banting travelled to London and faced off with the directors. He accused them of swindling the locals out of $100,000 worth of fox pelts in exchange for $5,000 worth of unhealthy whiteman food that made their teeth fall out. It was the HBC bigshots’ turn to be outraged. They accused Banting of slander. Alas, they themselves had never been to Canada. When they made some enquiries, they backed off, and actually sent Banting an apology. But back to the present. It has been the sorry end of many a once-iconic institution, built up over decades and sometimes centuries, to fall into the hands of today’s robber barons, the venture fund sharpies who specialize in enriching themselves by destroying the livelihoods of others. They have made themselves so filthy rich that, where they once were content to buy race-horses, they now buy politicians. Proving yet again that as long as we allow money to be power, we will always be ruled by the rich.