Cover Story
The Spirit of Enterprise
The North West Company helped build Canada. Today, it continues to
transform the retail landscape in the Canadian North
By Mark Halsall
C
elebrating its 150 th birthday as a nation this year,
Canada has a rich, colourful history that stretches
far back beyond Confederation. Central to this his-
tory is the North West Company, which since its founding in
1779 has been hugely instrumental in shaping our country.
Along with the Hudson’s Bay Company, the original
North West Company forged the fur trade industry in North
America. Among the early fur traders were men like Samuel
Hearne, Alexander Mackenzie, David Thompson and Simon
Fraser — fearless explorers who literally mapped out the
Canadian West and North as they scoured the nation’s vast
hinterlands in search of pelts in the late 18 th and early 19 th
centuries.
The North West Company traders, or Nor’westers as they
were known, helped establish a vast trading network that
endures to this day, in the form of the large chain of NWC-
operated stores that stretches across Canada’s North.
“A lot of communities would not exist today … if it wasn’t
for this trading network,” says Brett Marchand, the NWC’s
logistics head who’ll be among the presenters at the Supply
10 • SUPPLYCHAINCANADA.CA • SCMA
Chain Management Association’s national conference in
Winnipeg in June. “It is a big piece of our history. The North
West Company and the Hudson’s Bay Company had huge
roles to play in the building of Canada as a country.”
In his book, Frontier Vision: The Rebirth of the North West
Company, author Jake MacDonald describes how the NWC’s
storied past is firmly entwined with that of the company’s
powerful rival, the Hudson’s Bay Company. After several de-
cades of fierce competition and sometimes bloody disputes,
the two companies merged in 1821, but as MacDonald notes,
the story of the North West Company did not end there.
“To the casual observer the North West Company van-
ished in 1821. But for 166 years a remnant of the great
enterprise thrived in the gargantuan HBC. If any dimension
of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s North American operations
kept the spirit of the Nor’westers alive, and indeed the link to
the founding enterprising character of the Canadian north-
west, it was the northern stores, a network of more than two
hundred small shops serving remote, still barely accessible
communities across the same northern regions explored