Hudson's Bay looks to auction off royal charter that launched company 355 years ago

Hudson's Bay has asked a court to allow it to put the royal charter that launched the company 355 years ago on the auction block, along with its trove of art and historical artifacts.

The collapsing department store chain known as Canada's oldest company filed a motion with the Ontario Superior Court of Justice late Thursday asking for permission to sell 1,700 pieces of art and more than 2,700 artifacts.

The company has been seeking buyers for the items since last month but now wants to pull the art and artifacts from that process to ensure they get "care, consideration and expertise required" and "can be fully prioritized through a separate process facilitated by a fine art auction house." 

Court documents say the move was prompted in part by "government and quasi-government institutions, museums, universities, and high net worth individuals acting on their own accord or as potential benefactors to certain Canadian museums and institutions."

They have expressed interest in the art collection but also told the company they want the items to be made available for public viewing in a museum or other institution, said Adam Zalev, managing director of Hudson's Bay's financial advisor Reflect Advisors, in an affidavit filed Thursday.

A separate auction "is the most transparent, fair and efficient approach to monetize the art collection while recognizing and protecting its cultural and historical significance and ensuring compliance with any applicable legislation," he said.

His affidavit and the company's motion don't detail the full extent of the treasures that may be sold but a source familiar with the auction process, who was not authorized to speak publicly, said the art is mostly paintings, some of which date back as far as 1650.

The artifacts include point blankets, paper documents and even collectible Barbie dolls.

Hudson's Bay has said one of the items on the auction block is the charter it was granted by King Charles II in 1670.

In addition to establishing Hudson's Bay as a fur trading company, the document gave the business rights to a vast swath of land spanning most of the country and extraordinary power over trade and Indigenous relations for decades more.

"It's 100 per cent their crown jewel. There is no doubt this is the most significant document that the Hudson's Bay Company has access to or that they've ever produced," said Cody Groat, a historian of Canadian and Indigenous history who serves as the chair of the UNESCO Memory of the World Advisory Committee.

"Of course, there's other documents we can think of that speak to relationships with Indigenous peoples, business ventures and there's also hints of slavery in the Hudson's Bay Company archives, which are quite significant ... but this is the core."

Groat had heard of efforts in recent days to encourage Hudson's Bay to keep the charter from being auctioned off and instead donated somewhere like the Archives of Manitoba, which already serves as a custodian to some of the company's artifacts.

With that advice going unheeded, he now expects there to be interest in getting the document a UNESCO Memory of the World distinction, which is meant to safeguard documents of historical and cultural importance.