If I had a billion dollars...

The Hudson’s Bay Company might get bought out by the Americans?

Aw, shucks. Here is the final nail in the coffin for Canada as a sovereign state.

Or is it?

If American tycoon Jerry Zucker wants to spend a billion dollars just for the chance to turn around a business mired in red ink, why not sell out to him?

So long as the stores remain open in some form, as Target or maybe some hybrid (TarBay?), people get good customer service, and customers’ Bay cards retain their value, I suspect most Canadians won’t even notice the change.

How many Canadians even remember that Tim Horton’s has been owned by Wendy’s since 1995?

Let’s assume HBC does get bought out and the business does go back in the black, with all extra profits (after paying thousands of Canadian workers and taxes to the government) thrown into a cloth money sack somewhere in South Carolina. This is worse than keeping a money-losing operation going in perpetuity?

Of course, there is nothing preventing a rich Canadian from trying to buy out the HBC, if people are really worried about foreign ownership. It’s a free market. Who’s going to step up to the plate?

The HBC has a storied history in this country. But the HBC is not Canada, any more than McDonalds “is” the US or BMW “is” Germany. A nation is more than the sum of its corporations.