An Act for authorizing a guarantee of a loan to be raised by Canada for a payment in respect of the transfer of Rupert's Land [11th August 1869]

Peel 503, p.57

In 1863, a group calling itself the International Financial Society orchestrated a takeover of HBC. The new owners of the Company quickly increased HBC's market capitalization by promoting settlement, minerals, and a transcontinental telegraph — all based on selling or leveraging the Company's vast land holdings. However, the Governor and Committee soon realized that any attempt at promoting settlement would have to wait until there was a functioning government in place. The Company embarked on negotiations to sell its territories, first to Britain, who didn't want them, and then to the Province of Canada, who had no means to purchase them and, in any case, did not recognize HBC's claim to the land. With the creation of the Dominion of Canada in 1867, the transfer of Rupert's Land could finally move forward. The new federal government had an authority the Province of Canada did not. In 1869, HBC reached an agreement to transfer Rupert's Land, granted to the Company in the Royal Charter, back to the Crown. The deal was finalized in 1870 - without consulting Indigenous Peoples - and the land was included in the new Dominion of Canada three years after Confederation, making way for settler colonialism in western Canada. No thought was given to the sovereignty of peoples who had lived on the land for centuries, and for whom the fur trade had dramatically changed their economy. They were regarded instead as merely a deterrent to the further settlement of the west.

.