Trader, brewer, newspaper: With Hudson’s Bay no more, what’s Canada’s oldest company?

When Hudson’s Bay closed its department stores for good last year, it left behind more than the wreckage of a once-mighty retail giant.

A lofty title is also up for grabs: Canada’s oldest company.

The defunct retailer would have turned 356 this week — the charter forming the U.K.-headquartered fur trading business was dated May 2, 1670 — and its unique role in the history of Canada means extensive records remain that trace its path through the centuries. But, as The Canadian Press discovered over the past year, determining what company now warrants the descriptor is not clear-cut.

Few businesses from the 17th century have survived, and most companies close to that vintage have complicated histories that involve sales and mergers, closures and revivals. The contenders were all formed decades after Hudson’s Bay and sometimes lack historical records.

Separating fact from folk tale required help from historians, archivists and academics as well as healthy skepticism and a willingness to comb through databases to substantiate local lore.

Depending on what you think qualifies a company to be Canada’s oldest, there are a few that might reasonably be able to make a claim for the title.

They range from HBC’s one-time trading rival to newspapers and a global brewing giant. A case could also be made for Canadian Tire Corp. Ltd., which bought the HBC name and its other trademarks for $30 million last spring.

“There’s a lot of ways of thinking about it,” said Dimitry Anastakis, the L.R. Wilson/R.J. Currie chair in Canadian business history at the University of Toronto, who has been investigating the topic with researcher Joanne Archibald.

“This idea of the oldest Canadian firm is a little bit amorphous.”

If a contender closed and later reopened, should it be out of the running? If it merged with another firm, should its new owner get to claim the older company’s founding year as its own? If it operates in Canada and is listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange but was sold to a U.S. owner, does it still count?

It’s not like there’s an authority deciding what counts or is disqualifying, Anastakis said.

Fur trade roots

Given that HBC held the title for so long, a logical place to start is with its once-biggest competitor: the North West Co.

While it’s no longer a fur trader, the company with roots in the 18th century now operates some Northern, NorthMart, Giant Tiger, Alaska Commercial Co., Cost-U-Less and RiteWay Food Markets stores.

The business’s website said it was started by newly-arrived Highland Scots in 1779 in Montreal. They portaged, paddled through rough rapids and persevered through harsh winters, eventually becoming such a big threat to HBC that their rivalry escalated into violence.

But the North West Co. might not be in contention for several reasons. For starters, it merged with HBC in 1821 and didn’t make a comeback until investors acquired a division of HBC in 1987. They relaunched the business as the North West Co. in the 1990s.

The company was aware of this story but said no one was available to comment.

Even if you forgive the business interruption, others have the North West Co. beat on age alone.

Michael Dove, director of public history at the University of Western Ontario, pointed out that the Halifax Gazette, born in 1752, is even older.

However, one could argue the newspaper is disqualified from the running because it isn’t really a company anymore. Around Confederation in 1867, it came under government control. Now, it’s known as the Royal Gazette, a publication Nova Scotia uses to announce legislation.

Dove has also seen suggestions two breweries — a Nova Scotia tavern and alcohol giant Molson Coors — could be the oldest, but there are reasons to discount both.

Molson was born on the banks of the St. Lawrence River in 1786 and remains well known for its popular beer brands and lucrative sports sponsorships.

But it’s more of a dual-headquartered firm than a solely Canadian one because it merged with U.S. beer maker Coors in 2005. The move split its home base between Colorado and Montreal and its stock trades on both Canadian and U.S. exchanges.

Then, there’s the Split Crow, a bar in Halifax billing itself as “Nova Scotia’s original tavern.” It is sometimes assumed to be much older than it actually is because it took its name from a 17th century pub.

The Spread Eagle opened in 1749, supposedly under the first liquor licence issued in New Scotland (now Nova Scotia). It was named after the German coat of arms but affectionately became known as the Split Crow and the alleged site of the province’s first murder charge after a brawl between two mariners turned deadly in the pub’s founding year.

Mark Galic, who owns the modern Split Crow, is certain his pub is out of the running, because it opened in 1979.

“I don’t know when the original bar closed, but there were likely 200-plus years between the two,” Galic said in an email to The Canadian Press.

The record keepers

By contrast, HBC’s history was incredibly well-documented, despite its origin story starting when Canada was still centuries away from its birth and animal pelts were the continent’s most valuable currency.

By the time it collapsed three and a half centuries later, in March 2025, it was $1.1 billion in debt and based in Toronto but owned by a U.S. private equity company. It had a reputation for tired stores, a diminished clientele — and a painful colonial past.

“One thing the Hudson’s Bay Co. did have going for it was that it had a superb archive, one of the best in the world, and you could trace the company all the way back,” Dove said. “Very few have that, I would say, here in Canada.”

HBC’s textual records, like diaries, letters and research notes, live at the Archives of Manitoba and take up more than 1,500 linear meters of shelf space. They describe the company’s hundreds of trading posts, control of 40 per cent of modern Canada, extraordinary influence over Indigenous relations and transition to modern department stores in minute detail.

Really solidifying HBC’s claim, however, is its 1670 royal charter, which was issued by King Charles II and marked the business’ official formation.

The company held onto the charter through office relocations, Confederation and wartime bombings, but sold it for $18 million last year to pay off some of its debt. The Thomson and Weston families, of newspaper and grocery store fame, have donated it to four public institutions set to share the document.

Most other companies never had royal charters, let alone ones from 1670.

And even if they have archives that could prove they’re HBC’s successor, Dove said they’re often “thrown in one big giant room in the basement, gathering dust, no one caring for them.”

“Whenever I’ve looked into certain companies and spoken to those people who do have some responsibility for keeping records, it’s usually a one-person show and they usually don’t have the resources or the facilities that are really necessary to maintain these records,” Dove said.

Governments tend to keep more meticulous records but even they can’t say with certainty who HBC’s successor is.

A newsworthy contender

When The Canadian Press asked Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada, the federal government wing that oversees the country’s business registry, which company it considers to be the eldest, it deferred to the Library and Archives of Canada.

Virtue Tran, a reference librarian with the Library and Archives of Canada, turned up six contenders — a mix of newspapers, fisheries and breweries, including Molson.

The eldest was the Quebec Chronicle-Telegraph, which remains one of the continent’s oldest newspapers.

It began as the Quebec Gazette, a bilingual weekly paper founded by William Brown and Thomas Gilmore on June 21, 1764, long before lightbulbs, cars and computers.

The men published a four-page, 14-inch by 9.5-inch paper. The first pages were divided in half with English news on the left and French translations on the right. The later pages were mostly advertising.

Brown and Gilmore were printers, not journalists, and they didn’t have a contingent of reporters, so their earliest editions cribbed content from U.K. publications, historian Charles André Nadeau wrote in a column the paper published when it turned 250.

Now, it’s more of a community paper, reporting on local news and sports, reviewing plays and publishing obituaries. It’s dropped the bilingualism and says since 1925, it’s been the only English-language newspaper published in the predominantly French-speaking Quebec City region.

Like the other oldest company contenders, it doesn’t have a perfect record. It has ceased publication at least twice — once in response to the eventually-repealed 1765 Stamp Act and again during a siege of Quebec by American troops in the mid-1770s.

It merged with the Morning Chronicle in 1874 and the Daily Telegraph in 1925, changing names several times, and eventually becoming English-only.

It’s also had a slew of owners over its 262 years, including newspaper baron Roy Thomson and most recently, Ontario student housing mogul Ray Stanton.

Ruby Pratka, an assignment editor at the paper, said it “really hadn’t crossed her mind” that the publication might now be Canada’s oldest company. If it is, that would be “wild,” she said.

Bragging rights?

Others might be envious of a business like the Chronicle-Telegraph.

Being the oldest is an unrivaled point of pride because it means the paper survived the ultimate endurance test — wars, Confederation, technological advances, recessions — and is still kicking.

It’s also the kind of title companies can’t help but boast about because it tells consumers, “We’ve always been there for you, so you can count us.”

“Being first, being earliest, being oldest confers a little bit more credibility,” Anastakis said.

But if the Hudson’s Bay Co. story has taught us anything, it’s that nothing lasts forever. Companies come and go all the time and a storied history isn’t enough to keep them alive.

The newspaper industry knows this better than most. The number of print publications in Canada has steadily shrunk as reading habits shift online, where many are reticent to pay for news and some platforms have blocked journalism outlets.

For now, the Quebec Chronicle-Telegraph marches on.

“We just keep on doing what we do,” Pratka said. “And we hope that we can do so for the next little while at least.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published May 2, 2026.

Tara Deschamps, The Canadian Press