LIZ HODGSON: HUDSON BAY COMPANY -- A PARABLE OF CANADA'S DEMISE @Arts & Opinion

In the least surprising headline of 2025, we learned that The Bay is not long for this world.

What’s more surprising is that a grimly lit acre of retail space situated on some of the world’s priciest real estate—with its bewildered salespeople and endless racks of granny housecoats—lasted this long.

There’s a mall in San Francisco’s financial district called the Crocker Galleria. Once upon a time, it bustled with shoppers until bad landlords drove it into the ground. The gauntlet of fentanyl zombies and street-hardened lunatics hurling obscenities and using the sidewalk as a toilet chased off any remaining customers. Nowadays, Crocker looks more like the perfect set for a zombie apocalypse movie. You know where this is going…

Yes, a battered, barely-breathing mall, with only three stores in operation and hardly a shopper in sight, in SF’s blighted downtown, has fully functioning escalators. The Bay—a national icon and Canada’s once preeminent retail institution—does not. That tells you something.

Along with broken escalators and other glaring signs of bad management, The Bay has suffered through some awful ‘big picture’ corporate moves, including a clumsy expansion into digital and acquiring Saks without properly integrating it.

Then there’s Amazon, the asteroid that carelessly flattened the brick-and-mortar landscape into a giant crater. The Virus and its inflationary aftermath didn’t help. Also, per Ozymandias, the mighty have a way of falling.

Whether expected, inevitable, self-inflicted, or all of the above, this isn’t just another retail bankruptcy. More like ‘national humiliation,’ another dent in our already fragile identity and a total dragola.

To Americans, that all might sound a bit melodramatic… Like, what does a department store have to do with your national identity?

Well, American frens, you have your Founding Fathers, Johnny Appleseed, Tecumseh, Davy Crockett and the rest. We have the Baymen—brash 17th-century voyageurs who crossed the Atlantic, carved an empire across four million square miles of Hudson Bay watershed and launched a global fur trade two centuries before Confederation. In 1869, the Baymen sold this empire—known as Rupert’s Land—to the newly formed Dominion of Canada for £300,000. Basically, Canada didn’t invent The Bay. Rather, The Bay invented Canada.

For generations, cycling through many ups and downs, HBC was woven into the Canadian psyche, like the red and green stripes on one of those point blankets now selling for $3 grand on eBay. And now, just as Canada itself feels overwhelmed by dysfunction, The Bay empire is collapsing—a blow to the illusion that life was inching back to pre-2020 normalcy.

In retrospect, pre-2020 normalcy wasn’t all that normal. HBC has been a dead man walking since at least 2008, the year it fell to the global rentiers—a super-rich class of equity credit investors who swoop in on companies, real estate and even entire economies. Their intention is neither to build nor innovate, but to extract every last bit of value. The MO is simple: buy in, strip for parts, offload liabilities and leave behind a hollowed-out shell in pursuit of the next opportunity.

NRDC Equity Partners, The Bay’s new owners, seemed more interested in its real estate holdings than reinvesting in stores or customer experience. They sold off valuable locations, loaded the company with debt, and reduced a storied brand to a struggling relic, leaving its once-proud flagship stores to rot.

If all that sounds familiar, you may have been watching Canada’s real estate market—a place for foreign speculators to park cash and turn a profit, dating back to the late 1990s. By 2020, after hollowing out once lively neighbourhoods, the speculative buying frenzy (alongside record numbers of new immigrants) had turned the rental market into a near-dystopian ordeal. Anyone searching for a place in the past five years knows the nerve-racking, high-stakes game of trading your life savings for a 500-square-foot basement; hope and pray the landlord picks you over 50 other desperate applicants… and that the place comes with actual windows.

For reasons beyond me, our political class on both sides of the aisle let this foreign real estate bonanza happen. But a decade of Trudeau policies made everything exponentially worse. Trudeau didn’t kill The Bay. But he didn’t not kill it. Among other feckless ‘squeeze the middle class’ policies, his government raised taxes (of course) and doubled the national debt—a type of invisible tax on everyone. And it introduced a carbon tax, which is a tax on everything. It also net-zeroed our resource industry, canceling or shelving roughly $670 billion worth of oil, gas, LNG and pipeline projects, leading investors to flee and jobs to vanish.

This is Canada in 2025—not exactly a hospitable place for a struggling retail enterprise. The economy is sluggish, over-regulated and underperforming, with zero innovation and barely a flicker of growth. Worse yet, we’re hopelessly divided. Is this the “post-national” state Trudeau envisioned? The one with no “core identity”? In his globalist, neoliberal vision, there wasn’t much room for national emblems like The Bay.

But now, with an election coming, suddenly there is! To distract from the mess it created, the ruling party reached into its emblem grabbag and pulled out hockey. The result is #elbowsup, a cringe-inducing astroturfed crusade designed to pin all our crises on Donald Trump. They even flew in expat multimillionaire Mike Myers (looking like Subaru-driving Mad Aunt Jackie) to pose rinkside.

So we still have hockey but we don’t have Hudson’s Bay. If that leaves you feeling a little melancholic, join the club—we pretty much all feel it. Yes, we saw it coming. Yes, it was a retail train wreck. But it was our retail train wreck. The melancholy is compounded by our nostalgia for the pre-2020 “normal” decades, when both Canada and The Bay still felt semi-functional. Those were good times. We weren’t drowning in debt and twentysomethings could still dream of owning a home. Lineups for food banks didn’t stretch around the block and family doctors were plentiful. We didn’t have to worry about fentanyl, tent encampments, technology baking our dopamine receptors and AI taking our jobs.

We genuinely had no idea how good we had it and no idea we were the last ones.

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