After three-and-a-half centuries, the Hudson’s Bay Company as we knew it is history. So are its thousands of artifacts, principally the royal charter of 1670, which will go to auction in July. If the federal government does not intervene, many of these storied items will fall into private hands.
This would deprive Canadians of a rich part of their past. It would be an enormous cultural loss at a moment when the United States is calling the legitimacy of Canada’s sovereignty into question. The timing of the sale is either a calamity or an opportunity.
The collection is called a window into this country’s history. It illuminates colonial administration, the fur trade, and relations with Indigenous peoples. There are paintings of explorers, Indigenous leaders, and governors; tools, clothing, and beadwork; fur pelts, point blankets, scales, ledgers, and journals of company officials.
The most famous of some 4,400 items (and the most contentious) is the Royal Proclamation Charter issued by King Charles II. It is the crown jewel. It granted the company trading rights to lands making up much of contemporary Canada. It also erased the territorial sovereignty of many First Nations.
The fate of the charter is critical. It cannot be left to the avarice, ineptitude, or indifference that killed the Bay, the country’s oldest company. On June 1, the Bay closed its 80 stores (36 in Ontario) and put 12,000 employees out of work. Like the end of any institution, it dissolved a cherished relationship with generations of patrons. That cannot be undone.
What we can do, though, as a country, is to celebrate the charter as a founding document of our nation — and do what is necessary to protect it.
Its stature isn’t as clear as you might think. While leading interpreters of our past have begun to speak out about the charter's importance, it does not seem to have garnered mass public support.
It should be effectively treated the same way as the Quebec Act of 1774, the British North America Act of 1867, and the Constitution Act of 1982. This is no time for caution. A serious country would not let the charter leave its shores or end up in a private collection, where it might disappear from public view.
If it goes to the highest bidder at the auction to pay off the Bay’s creditors, the charter could hang on a plutocrat’s wall. This is not a prediction, but it is a possibility. How, then, to prevent that?
Simply put, the federal government should use all instruments at its disposal as a guardian of national heritage. It could buy the charter itself (it’s been estimated to me that the document could fetch between $7 million and $15 million) or acquire it by other means.
The charter should travel across the country, if its condition allows, and then be put on display at the Canadian Museum of History in Ottawa.
But let’s think bigger. Imagine displaying the document not just in Ottawa, or the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, or the Manitoba Archives in Winnipeg, where it now resides. Imagine creating a grand exhibition hall and offering programs to examine the charter’s meaning and legacy, not only in the political and economic realm, but its consequences for Indigenous peoples
Imagine it on display with Canada’s other founding documents, the way the U.S. Constitution is displayed in Washington and the Magna Carta is in London. History is about showing as well as telling, however we can.
If necessary, Prime Minister Mark Carney should be personally involved. His personal intervention would make political sense. Stopping the sale of the charter to a private buyer, and keeping it in Canada, would be a masterstroke for a new government eager to show a little cultural nationalism. It would be widely applauded.
Carney knows that letting the charter go would be an international embarrassment. As he rides a wave of popularity driven by a new sense of Canadian pride, rescuing a historic treasure would look smart, bold, and shrewdly patriotic.
Carney speaks of responding to Donald Trump’s threat by diversifying trade, creating an internal market, and building things. Retaining the charter would be about building identity — as urgent a national project in its way as pipelines and high-speed rail.
So, let’s understand what matters here. The royal charter is an indispensable part of who we are and how we came to be. It must remain in Canada, in the public domain, as a means of expression of our progress as a people to each other — and to the world.