Hudson's Bay Company officials in an express canoe crossing a lake, Manitoba, c. 1825.Peter Rindisbacher/Library and Archives Canada
Stephen R. Bown is the author of The Company: The Rise and Fall of the Hudson’s Bay Empire, which won the 2021 National Business Book Award.
In its early days as a fur trader, the storied Hudson’s Bay Company was nearly destroyed when the French navy assaulted its forts. Generations later, in 1780, it almost shrivelled to irrelevancy when smallpox ravaged Indigenous populations, its trading partners. The company’s demise likewise seemed imminent when its trading territory was invaded by the upstart North West Company from Montreal. Or when the fur trade declined.
Each time, Hudson’s Bay endured. This is what we must keep in mind when we consider the most recent blow to the company.
Hudson’s Bay was granted creditor protection last Friday, after being unable to pay its bills. Hudson’s Bay reported a net loss of $329.7-million in the year that ended Jan. 31, 2025. In the most optimistic scenario, the company is working on a restructuring plan that could see half of its 80 stores closed.
The situation is dire. But let’s not forget that throughout its centuries of ever-evolving business operations, the Hudson’s Bay Company faced the prospect of imminent insolvency many times and reinvented itself to meet the new challenges of the day. Perhaps its current leaders can take inspiration from its history of adapting to change and save the storied company once again.
The genesis of one of the greatest business enterprises in North American history sprung from the minds of two roguish French-Canadian schemers and adventurers, Pierre-Esprit Radisson and Médard Chouart des Groseilliers. In 1659, they departed from the fledging settlements of New France on an epic multiyear canoe expedition far to the West beyond the Great Lakes to the Mandan villages of the Upper Missouri River, where they were introduced to trade fairs at the centre of a web of intercontinental trade and commerce among diverse Indigenous peoples.
Goods from around the interior of the continent were on offer, “the most exquisit [sic] things to shew what his country affoards [sic].” Furs, buffalo robes, eagle feathers, grease, obsidian, pottery, dried corn, herbs, rice and tobacco, decorative seeds and shells, dried meat and leather were eagerly exchanged, but there was one type of good that was conspicuously absent: anything manufactured, and especially anything made from metal.
Mr. Radisson and Mr. Groseilliers knew their history and they knew that English ships had recently sailed into and returned from Hudson Bay. They imagined that if ships could routinely navigate to the heart of the continent, they could tap into this trade network and make their fortunes.
Back in New France, which was then mandating a quasi supply-management scheme for the fur trade, their furs were confiscated and their ideas spurned. They made their way to England, where their grand scheme was met with a more favourable response from King Charles II. The English aristocracy was eager to combine profit with patriotism in beating the French at the fur trade game.
And so began one of the most storied business enterprises in North American history. In 1670, The Governor and Company of Adventurers of England, trading into Hudson’s Bay was given a Royal charter and monopoly over the entire watershed of Hudson’s Bay, around four million square kilometres of land including most of what are now known as Ontario, Quebec, Manitoba, the southern parts of Saskatchewan and Alberta, and a good portion of the future states of North Dakota and Minnesota.
Over the next two centuries of profitable commercial exchange, the company expanded its operations from a series of wholesale distribution centres along the chilly rim of Hudson Bay, with the Indigenous peoples managing the inland retail trade, to encompass most of northern North America west to the wild shores of the Pacific Ocean, including the present-day U.S. states of Washington, Oregon, Idaho and western Montana. Many future Canadian cities were formed from its hundreds of inland outposts, including Winnipeg, Edmonton and Victoria.
The company’s policy of cultural integration and diplomatic marriage not only boosted profits but also gave rise to a distinct mixed heritage culture that became the foundation of the Métis. Although its U.S. territories were ceded in 1846 during the era of Manifest Destiny, the company’s dominant commercial presence throughout Canada provided the precedent for the border with the U.S. along the 49th parallel.
When the company sold its monopoly to the new country of Canada in 1870, allowing the nation to double in size and extend to the Pacific, it undoubtedly prevented Canada from becoming subsumed into the United States. Sir John A. Macdonald then set out to build the Canadian Pacific Railway to connect the disparate regions of the nation.
With the fur trade in decline and its monopoly a distant dream, the company turned to real estate speculation, developing its landholdings as the CPR snaked west and new towns sprung up in its wake. Many of the company’s current real estate holdings likely date from this era. Hudson’s Bay then turned its eyes north and extended its operations into the Arctic, eventually becoming the general store for half the continent and thriving despite competition. Transforming itself into a retail department store was a natural progression from being the supplier of manufactured goods during the fur trade era, changing the goods on offer as the country prospered.
The company could have closed shop with the decline of the fur trade, yet transformed itself to serve the waves of new immigrants. It’s what the company had always done. When smallpox ravaged the Indigenous trading partners of Hudson’s Bay, it pivoted and expanded its operations inland, taking its trade to the people who could no longer manage the arduous trek east and north to Hudson Bay. When it was challenged by the North West Company, it merged with its energetic competitor and kept its iconic name.
Whether the venerable company will be able to reinvent itself this time around remains to be seen. Like most Canadians, I haven’t shopped at The Bay – as it’s colloquially known – very much in recent years, but its disappearance would be more than the demise of just another business corporation. Rather, it would be the loss of a cultural icon – the loss of a tangible reminder of our storied and adventurous commercial foundations.