TORONTO — The Thomson and Weston families have cleared the final hurdle on the road to buying and donating the royal charter that created the Hudson's Bay Co.
An Ontario court has given the shuttered retailer permission to sell the 355-year-old document to the two families for $18 million.
The families plan to jointly donate it to the Archives of Manitoba, the Manitoba Museum, the Canadian Museum of History and the Royal Ontario Museum.
The institutions will own the document equally though the families want the charter to first go on display in Winnipeg, where HBC opened its first store in 1881.
They have also requested a consultation process with Indigenous groups, museums, universities, archives, subject matter experts and the public be used to decide how the charter will be shared and displayed.
The charter was issued by King Charles II in 1670. It created HBC and gave the company control over one-third of modern Canada at a time of colonization.