With The Fall of the Bay Is It Time for a Sovereign Canada?
Canada is flailing—romanticizing railway hotels and faded department stores while pretending it's on the cutting edge of justice and identity. As Hudson’s Bay Company crumbles, we aren’t watching a store fail. We’re watching a colonial cornerstone crack. And instead of mourning, we should be asking: what was this company, really?
It was the Crown’s corporate spearhead. The first private-public partnership in conquest. A trade empire that mapped, divided, and monetized land that was never theirs to begin with. This wasn’t commerce—it was colonization. And the Crown? It still sits at the top of the pyramid.
The British people didn’t orchestrate famines, occupation, and mass land theft—the Crown did. A monarchy backed by weapons, legislation, and the Church. Wherever the Crown landed, starvation followed. In India, tens of millions died in famines engineered for profit. In Ireland, over a million starved while food was exported. In Sudan, Kenya, Zimbabwe, and Nigeria, starvation and forced labor were used as policy. In Jamaica, Barbados, and Trinidad, sugar plantations were run by enslaved Africans. In Australia, Indigenous peoples were wiped out through land seizure and food deprivation. And in Canada, genocide was carried out through starvation policies, residential schools, and systemic erasure. The Crown didn’t govern—it extracted. It didn’t unify—it divided. It didn’t build—it fed off the bodies of the already broken.
Did my Irish ancestors flee engineered famine only to land in another corner of the same empire? Did my Scottish lineage arrive here after being cleared from ancestral land—poverty-stricken, desperate, and displaced by Crown policy? My German ancestry—driven by war, poverty, and the promise of freedom, sought refuge here too. What does it mean to carry within me both the displaced and the displacing?.This isn’t a simple inheritance. It’s a tangle of trauma, resilience, and complicity. It forces me to ask—what do I owe to this place, and what do I owe to truth and what do I owe my ancestors who made their way here and built a life here? What do I owe to the legacy they started four generations ago? How will I add to that legacy and story and make room for my children and thier children to add to it and shape it and pass it on again?
Like an estimated 32% of Canadians I too carry British ancestry, I know it is possible to be proud of that cultural inheritance while still rejecting the power structure that abused its own people—and most everyone else. The more I say the quiet part out loud the more I believe that reconciliation is impossible and the attempts made carry insult and injury WHILE the Crown remains intact. We can rename streets, issue apologies, and build monuments—but if the system that orchestrated the harm still presides over us, is that justice or just performance? The monarchy didn’t just symbolize colonialism, It legislated it, and while Queen Elizabeth’s image softened the truth for many—calm, ceremonial, and distant—King Charles reveals the machinery beneath the mask. For me, there’s no warmth here, no illusion of kindness, just the cold, reptilian legacy of empire and yet we still swear allegiance. We still print his face on our money. We still allow his emissaries to approve our laws. What, exactly, are we reconciling if we won’t confront the root - the Hydra.
Canada’s colonial history isn’t just about the British monarchy—it’s about an entire empire of control, a power network between the Crown and the Roman Catholic Church that built this country on subjugation, starvation, and subservience. The Church and the monarchy weren’t just partners; they were one and the same, two arms of the same machine. One took land, the other took souls. One wielded laws, the other wielded fear and they played their roles well. The Church ran the residential schools, stripping Indigenous children of their language, culture, and humanity, while the Crown dictated who was "civilized" enough to own land, vote, or even exist as a legal person. The Catholic Church, acting as the moral enforcer of empire, justified every act of conquest, all in the name of "saving" those they sought to dominate.
And now, in 2025, we are expected to believe that reconciliation can happen within the very framework that created the harm? That we can redefine Canadian identity while still bowing to the same monarchy that signed the orders of our oppression? The illusion of progress is just another method of control.
This is where my work collides with my conscience. I sell land. I value homes. But do I also, in some deeper way, participate in a system that was never designed to serve its people—only to manage them? Wasn’t real estate always the Crown’s endgame—land divided, titled, and taxed? Ownership, not as stewardship, but as control? Are we still using their blueprints? Every title deed is built on exclusion. Every parcel is drawn from a map etched in conquest. We call it real estate. But is it just colonization with better branding?
Why do we still call this a sovereign nation while we kneel, symbolically and legally, to a monarch across the ocean? The Americans cut the cord in 1776. What exactly are we waiting for? Isn’t it time to imagine a Canadian republic—one accountable not to empire, but to its people? Isn’t it time to build something truly our own?
What would it look like to claim not just property, but purpose? What might emerge if we finally ended the illusion—if we released the Crown, let its relics crumble, and stepped fully into the unknown? Could we build a country that isn’t inherited from conquest, but authored by conscience? Could we live not as subjects, but as sovereigns?
Will we stand from bent knee and lift our bowed head as we watch the ships set sail and head east into the sunrise so we can face the discomfort on a grass-roots level of what it feels like to stand shoulder to shoulder with all who call Canada home? To do what we can to reconcile a past and tend to left over wounds that we allow to be continually salted?
Countries That Have Fully Freed Themselves from the Crown (Now Republics):
United States – 1776
Ireland – 1949 (formally became a republic and left the Commonwealth)
India – 1950
Pakistan – 1956
South Africa – 1961
Ghana – 1960
Sri Lanka – 1972
Guyana – 1970
Trinidad and Tobago – 1976
Dominica – 1978
Zimbabwe – 1980
Malta – 1974
Mauritius – 1992
Fiji – 1987 (after two military coups, cut ties and became a republic)
The Gambia – 1970 (left monarchy), briefly returned, left again in 2015
Seychelles – 1976 (gained independence, republic status immediately)
Barbados – 2021 (the most recent to remove the Queen as head of state)
Canada remains one of just 14 Commonwealth realms where the British monarch is still the official head of state, alongside countries like Australia, New Zealand, and Jamaica. But many of these are now actively questioning that allegiance.
If you are interested about learning more on this topic visit: Citizens for a Canadian Republic
Article of interest and inspiration for this post: The Untold Story of The Hudson’s Bay Company
Yours in truth always,
Kathleen
