The Globe and Mail this morning has a lot of detail about the future of the Charter of the Hudson Bay Company, now that the company itself is no longer around to maintain it. Mostly it seems to be good news, maybe even a story of some billionaires actually doing a not-evil thing.
Decades ago, the Hudson Bay Company donated its immense archives to the Manitoba Archives and its equally impressive artifact collection to the Manitoba Museum, while also using its tax break windfall from that to provide funds to those institutions to handle what they had been given, About the same time they also spun off their quaint little "Beaver" magazine to become the genesis of today's Canada's History and all its history-related projects, also with a foundational grant to help it launch.
I was drawn into these matters in the 1990s, when I was asked to talk to a few people and draft a report about the conservation of the HBC Charter. I'm ashamed to admit I cannot recall who exactly wanted the story, and I don't seem to have preserved much documentation of my small contribution, not even a draft text. But I vividly remember being taken to the HBC corporate offices high above Queen Street in Toronto and shown the famous Charter, by then hermetically sealed inside a protective canister based on technology developed for use in space capsules.
(I do remember being pleased at my own cleverness when I drafted a lede to the effect of: "How do you protect a 300 year old piece of sheepskin so that it will survive for another 300 years? It doesn't seem like rocket science. But in fact, it is.")
At the time, the Company leaders had decided not to include its charter from 1670 in its disposition of its historical materials. I guess they expected they might be in business another 300 years or so and should keep the vital document that justified their existence close to hand. That is why the Charter and its new and impermeable case sat in a corporate office space and not in the museum and the archives that had everything else.
So this year,when the Yank owners drove the Bay into insolvency in a swirl of property speculation and asset-stripping, the Charter, virtually alone among the Bay's historical treasures, ended up being part of the spoils to be auctioned off in a process mostly of interest to real estate investors.
Fortunately, the dissolution of the Bay is being supervised by the courts of Ontario, and the judge in charge declared bluntly in September 2025 he intended to safeguard the Charter if no one else did:
“I must say I’m concerned, increasingly so, about the process,” Ontario Superior Court Justice Peter Osborne said during that Sept. 29 hearing. “And I am going to keep this on the rails. .... We are going to do this right, not fast.”
Move ahead a couple of months, and two parties who might have been among the competitive bidders at a highest-bidder gavelling away of the HBC Charter have gotten together to present what may be both a pre-emptive bid and a sensible solution.
The Weston interests and the Thomson interests (ie, more money than anybody) have proposed to put up many millions for the Charter. Their commitment is to make Manitoba its official home while confiding ownership jointly to the Manitoba Museum, the Manitoba Archives, the Royal Ontario Museum, and the Canadian Museum of History. The National Council for Truth and Reconciliation, which was consulted in this process, is providing a letter supporting this solution, on the understanding that indigenous voices are and will be fully included.
Sounds better that leaving the HBC Charter buried in a corporate HQ somewhere, or shipped away to adorn some Saudi prince's private cabinet of wonders.
Image: Google Images
