BY ROBERT CATTO
““We bemoaned the impersonality of the modern world, but that was a lie, it seemed to him; it had never been impersonal at all.
There had always been a massive delicate infrastructure of people, all of them working unnoticed around us, and when people stop going to work, the entire operation grinds to a halt.””
It’s been a funny time to be Canadian, lately.
Even watching from afar, the renewed passion for our home and native land (as the national anthem says) has been startling to see, as threats to make the country “the 51st state” have come from south of the border. Think pieces in august publications like The Atlantic have even discussed what an invasion—however unlikely it seems—might look like, if the trade war became a real one.
And the reaction has been passionate. Canadians have always loved the maple leaf on our flag, but the addition of the phrase ‘elbows up’—a hockey defence for when you’re being charged by an opponent, meaning the first thing they’ll hit is a nice sharp elbow.
At the same time, however, one of the mainstays of Canadian culture has been folding.
The Hudson’s Bay Company was founded by royal charter in 1670, which makes it nearly 200 years older than the country itself; and while not that long ago it was successful enough to take control of a company like Saks Fifth Avenue and bring it to Toronto, retail stresses and a series of owners left the company—like previous department store competitors Eaton’s and Simpsons—in dire financial straits, and closing their locations across the country.
The final few days of The Bay happened to be while I was back in Toronto earlier this year, so I couldn’t resist the chance to walk around the last of the retail giant’s properties, at Yorkdale mall and their flagship downtown store at Queen & Yonge St.
Being at The Bay reminded me of Emily St. John Mandel’s novel Station Eleven, about a pandemic that wiped out most of the population of the world—ironically it’s ten years old now, but was being filmed for a miniseries when the actual pandemic hit in 2020.
It’s set in Toronto, and begins at a theatre just across the road from The Bay—but a lot of it is spent walking through the remains of the civilisation that existed, and considering all the assumptions we made at the time about how things worked, the apparent permanence of what was around us; and how quickly that could be proven wrong.
It’s an eerie feeling to be alone on floor after floor of what used to be a bustling department store, while ads still play on giant screens surrounded by empty shelves, single dresses hang on racks, and a sole person reads their phone in a vacant shoe department.
Rows of signs advertise that they themselves are for sale, never mind the goods that once stood alongside them. A cash register sits untended, plaintive text asking “did you find everything you’re looking for?”, and getting no answer.
And an entire display reading “yep that’s it!” lies barren, the text that once suggested you’d finally found the thing you were looking for now reading quite differently.
That is indeed it, for The Bay…
Still, while generations of Canadians now have to live with the knowledge that their beloved Hudson’s Bay is gone, at least there are a couple of reassuring things we can look forward to.
One is that Canadian Tire, a slightly younger brand of shops specialising first in car parts, and now in everything under the sun, has acquired The Bay’s iconic stripes and can make all kinds of new things with of them, should they so choose. (And having spent $30m, it’s a pretty safe bet they will.)
And the other is just that, well, at least there are still many decades’ worth of well-made wool blankets that carry the old Hudson Bay tag on them.
If you’ve got one, look after it!
