Who Gets What Now?

In April, the Bay told former senior executives that their pensions under its supplementary executive retirement plan would be cut. As the Globe and Mail reports, the supplementary executive pension fund wasn’t fully pre-funded and, under Canadian law, receives less protection than a standard, registered pension fund. As of 2022, the fund was short $84.5 million.

At the same time, the newspaper noted that the larger employee fund — the one covering 20,000 workers, the bulk of the Bay’s employees — was actually in a surplus position, covering a mix of defined benefit and defined contribution schemes. The Bay’s then chief financial officer, Jennifer Bewley, wrote in a March affidavit that the bigger pension fund “is sufficiently funded and is able to satisfy its liabilities.” The company says pension payments from registered payment plans will continue, “and there are no plans to change this.” That’s reassuring — maybe. Many workers remain concerned that, despite what the company says, they may lose their pensions, as some already have.

On May 26, Unifor, Canada’s largest private sector union and the group that represents several hundred Bay employees, rallied in Ontario “to demand that Hudson’s Bay Company [HBC] put workers first as it moves through its liquidation process.” Unifor demanded that HBC “honour its obligations to employees by protecting wages, pensions, and benefits.”

A court will now decide what workers are due for compensation and future payouts. The Bay is pushing to access Canada’s Wage Earner Protection Program, a federal program designed to pay outstanding wages to employees of bankrupt companies. If approved, workers could receive a maximum payout of over $8,000 each. Most employee benefits, including health and dental, have already ended, while long-term disability support will end June 15. The company has said workers will receive neither termination nor severance payouts.

Private Equity Is a Wrecking Ball

Private equity lies at the heart of the Bay’s collapse. In 2008, US-based NRDC Equity Partners bought the Bay just as brick-and-mortar retailers began to reckon with the rise of e-commerce. Today the Bay is blaming the pandemic, the US-Canada trade war, and a broader decrease in department store traffic for its decline — but sharper eyes see through the excuses. Before the closure, and after the Bay’s private equity capture, experts were noting a “lack of investment” in the retail stores themselves. One professor went so far as to call the Bay’s purchase by NRDC “the point at which the company began its slow death.”

Critics have long argued that NRDC’s purchase was a real estate play — or “land grab” — rather than a retail strategy. Even Richard Baker, the founder of NRDC, has pointed out the value of the real estate when he purchased the company, saying it was worth $5 billion, when his firm paid $1.2 billion for it.

As CBC reports, sometime after the purchase, NRDC, which was pursuing other department store ventures, spun off the Bay as its own, standalone company, “saddled with debt.” It was a classic private equity play of corporate depredation, the sort that leaves companies and their workers holding the bag in the end while a company is stripped for parts. In the case of the Bay, this includes the sale of its intellectual property to Canadian Tire, a national big-box chain for hardware, auto supplies, and home goods.

In the end, the Bay’s brand might live on — Canadian Tire now holds the option to make use of the company’s aesthetic and nostalgic appeal. But the Bay’s former employees are left looking for work or worrying whether they can remain retired — or ever retire at all.

The Red, White, and. . . Almighty Green

The knife is being plunged into workers’ backs at the very same moment that Canadian nationalism is surging in response to threats from Donald Trump and the United States. As Canadians and their leaders wave the flag and celebrate a country proudly not American, it’s worth noting that Canada’s oldest company — predating the country itself — is being put into the ground by American private equity.

Private equity, in the form of leveraged buyouts designed to extract rents and plunder distressed firms, is a menace. The capitalists behind these maneuvers have no commitment to workers or history or national touchstones. It may seem obvious, but bears repeating: these people care about profits and nothing else. And the state, far from defending the public interest, either looks the other way or cheers them on. “Something, something, ‘creative destruction.’ Something, something ‘free market.’”

The truth is, the power brokers running the United States, Canada, and other advanced economies have already made their choice. Despite the populist rhetoric — whether from MAGA Republicans or from Liberals and Conservatives singing paeans to workers and the middle class — they continue to clear a path for corporate raiders. They’re not neutral. They’re accomplices.

Now, in place of a centuries-old company that once sold goods to Canadians across the country and employed thousands, there is nothing but lost jobs, imperilled pensions, a real-estate grab, and the plundering of assets. This is the legacy of private equity. In what world does any of this square with the industry’s rhetoric about “improving efficiencies” or “unlocking value”? Nothing has been improved — only dismantled. All that’s happened is an upward transfer of wealth into fewer and fewer hands.

In another world — one where governments were pushed by workers to act in their interest — it would be employees and communities, not financiers, buying up distressed firms, revitalizing them, and sharing in their rewards. But that’s not yet our world, and the death of the Bay — after 355 years — is a stark reminder of that.