Your first look at what Canadian Tire is doing with the Hudson’s Bay stripes

TORONTO – When Canadian Tire learned that it had come out on top of a bidding war to own the Hudson’s Bay stripes this summer, one of its marketing executives said the feeling was comparable only to the most magical time of year.

“It was like Christmas, quite honestly,” Eva Salem recalled of the June moment when her company got court permission to buy a treasure trove of HBC’s intellectual property, including the multicoloured motif, the HBC name and other slogans and trademarks from the defunct retailer for $30 million.

“We were so excited.”

But the joy quickly evolved into a reminder that owning one of the oldest and most venerable symbols of Canadiana comes with enormous weight. The motif hearkens back to a painful past when the fur trade colonialized Indigenous land, but is also rev