The conference room at the Manitoba Museum of nature was filled with invited guests to welcome the HBC Royal Charter to Winnipeg.
The Charter came to Winnipeg thanks to the generosity of the Weston and Thomson families who bought it for $18 million as a gift to donate to the Manitoba Museum, the Archives of Manitoba, the Canadian Museum of History and the Royal Ontario Museum. Each institution will take turns hosting it.
Among others, in attendance were her honour Lt. Governor Anita Neville, former Governor General Mary Simon, Former Premier Gary Doer, former National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, Ovide Mercredi, and Chief Gordon Bluesky of Treaty No. 1.
Mary Simon spike of her early life working as a clerk for HBC in Kuujjuaq, in northern Quebec. She told of her father’s career as a factor for HBC and how severe the penalty was for white men who fraternized with native women. He eventually left the company so he could marry Mary’s mother, but she said he never had an ill word to speak of the company. Mary’s father, Bob May, was originally from Riding Mountain in Manitoba.
Chief Bluesky won the day with his warm speech in which he noted that folks who had been in this country for generations viewed Indigenous persons more as partners than those who came later. He retraced the history of that important trading relationship which HBC epitomized. He ended his speech with a recording of a song from a former mentor named Teddy Longbottom, a Metis. The opening lyrics of The Ballad of Gordy Ross: My name is Gordy Ross. My age is three and thirty. I’m a tripman for the HBC. My work is hard and dirty.”
From the invitation sent out by the Museum.
In 1670, King Charles II issued the HBC Royal Charter, granting exclusive land, trading, and exploration rights over the entire Hudson Bay watershed to the Governor and Company of Adventurers Trading into Hudson Bay (Hudson’s Bay Company). The HBC Royal Charter is a foundational document and critical to the historical development of Canada as a nation.
The HBC Royal Charter is a crucial and complex part of our history, with modern implications on land rights, Indigenous sovereignty, and the ongoing legacy of colonization. When the Hudson’s Bay Company filed for bankruptcy in March of 2025, the HBC Royal Charter became subject to auction as part of the liquidation process.
There was concern among historians, museums, archives, and Indigenous communities that the document would end up in a private collection, perhaps even outside of the country.
The Weston family and David Thomson came forward with a joint bid to secure the HBC Royal Charter and to gift it to a consortium of four public institutions: the Archives of Manitoba, the Manitoba Museum, the Canadian Museum of History, and the Royal Ontario Museum.
The Consortium members each have a longstanding commitment to Canadian history, to First Nations, Inuit, and Métis communities in the spirit of Truth and Reconciliation, and to serving the public interest.
Through this partnership, the Consortium members act as co-custodians of the HBC Royal Charter on behalf of all Canadians. Additional funding was also committed by the donors and other supporters to deliver a broad range of activities including national engagement on the Charter’s future, the development of educational programming, and the delivery of public outreach initiatives.
In the fall of 2025, the Court of King’s Bench in Ontario set two conditions for the auction of the HBC Royal Charter: that it had to remain in Canada, and that it had to be donated to a public institution or institutions who would steward it on behalf of Canadians.
In December of 2025, a generous bid by two prominent Canadian families ensured that the HBC Royal Charter would remain in Canada and be made accessible to Canadians.
The Welcoming Ceremony and Reception is a historic event to formally welcome the HBC Royal Charter into the hands of Canadians. It will mark the beginning of the Consortium’s work of national engagement around the Charter’s future, ensuring robust and meaningful conversations in the year ahead.
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