Did the Hudson Bay Company sow the seeds for Western alienation?

Did the Hudson Bay Company sow the seeds for one of Canada’s oldest political beefs—Western alienation? Sort of.

In 1670, King Charles II handed the Hudson Bay Company 3.8 million square kilometres of North America, basically a third of what is now Canada.

Back then, the HBC territory, called Rupert’s Land, included the whole of Manitoba, most of Saskatchewan, southern Alberta, southern Nunavut, and northern parts of Ontario and Quebec. Its namesake, Prince Rupert of the Rhine, was a nephew of King Charles I and the first governor of HBC.

This fur-trading behemoth had more power than some actual governments— signing treaties, raising armies, making war. You know, just retail things. But today, HBC can barely pay rent on a mall lease. The empire is crumbling, and with it, a reminder of how corporate colonialism helped carve out modern Canada.

When Canada scooped up Rupert’s Land from HBC in 1870, it cost the federal government £300,000 or about $1.5 million, an amount of money that likely couldn’t buy you a house in the GTA today.

Out of that land, the feds created Manitoba that same year.

The government made the province so fast, some didn’t think it was legal, so the British Parliament amended the British North America Act to make it so.

Saskatchewan and Manitoba would enter Confederation soon after in 1905.

But the three Prairie provinces were not equal to the others as they did not have control over their own public land or natural resources, the federal government did.

Eastern politicians argued it was only fair — they footed the bill, after all, in acquiring Rupert’s Land in the first place, and the feds, known as the Dominion government back then, was therefore justified in recouping those costs through the sale of Crown lands and resource rights. (Control of public lands was also important to building the national railway).

For the West, it meant watching profits flow eastward while they struggled to pay for schools and basic infrastructure. Imagine trying to build a province without the ability to sell the dirt under your feet. (Remember this was before income tax and provincial sales tax existed). That’s how resentment takes root.

The injustice finally started to get patched up in 1930, when the Natural Resources Acts gave Western provinces the same resource rights as the East. It was the crisis of the Great Depression that forced the federal government’s hand. 

But those political scars still throb every time a federal policy rubs the Western provinces the wrong way.

So as the Hudson’s Bay Company slowly goes the way of Eaton’s and Zellers, let’s not just mourn the end of an era. Let’s remember that this resource-siphoning history still echoes through every moment the West wonders if anyone in Ottawa is listening.

For further reading I recommend the books Let the Eastern Bastards Freeze in the Dark: The West Versus the Rest Since Confederation by Mary Janigan  and The Company: The Rise and Fall of the Hudson’s Bay Empire by Stephen Bown.