BATTLE FOR THE BAY

How the country's oldest corporation came to its bitter end

- By Anthony Milton

The tangled story of the AMERICAN REAL ESTATE TYCOON who stripped HBC for parts, the ECCENTRIC CHINESE BILLIONAIRE who lobbed a half-baked Hail Mary bid and the CANADIAN PLUTOCRATS who hatched their own backroom deal

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.

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.