Hudson’s Bay Company, Canada’s oldest retailer, didn’t die of natural causes — it was gutted by private equity. Stripped of assets and loaded with debt, it leaves behind job losses, endangered pensions, and a hollowed-out legacy reduced to branding rights.

Canada’s oldest company is dead. Hudson’s Bay, an iconic department store chain whose first location opened in 1881, has closed its retail shops and laid off its remaining employees — over 8,300 of them. The closures bring an end to a story that stretches back to the seventeenth century and the early days of the colonial project of British North America, the fur trade, and what would later become the country of Canada.

Today workers and former executives of the Bay are struggling to get a share of what they’re owed by the company, incl

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