The Puget Sound Agricultural Company

Saanich has been the home to First Nations people for thousands of years. The non-native history begins with the arrival of the Hudson's Bay Company in the 1840s.
The Craigflower Schoolhouse (originally called Maple Point School), the oldest surviving school building in Western Canada, was built on orders from Kenneth MacKenzie. He came from Scotland with his family in 1852, on the Hudson's Bay Company ship Norman Morison, to establish a farm for the Puget Sound Agricultural Company, a subsidiary of the Hudson's Bay Company. A school was needed for the children of farm employees, as well as those of arriving settlers.

The Puget Sound Agricultural Company (PSAC), commonly referred to with variations of the name using Puget Sound or Puget's Sound, was a joint stock company formed around 1840 as a subsidiary of the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC). The purpose of the company was ostensibly to promote settlement by British subjects of land on the Pacific coast of North America. Company operations were centered at Fort Nisqually in the Columbia District (known to Americans as the Oregon Country). At the fort (near present day Olympia, Washington) the company developed dairy, livestock and produce farms. The company also operated many large farms in the area of Fort Victoria on Vancouver Island. The primary reason for the company's incorporation was to protect HBC board members and shareholders from accusations and suits resulting from violation of that company's terms of license, which were only to trade with the native peoples and did not include the right to engage in commercial farming.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puget_Sound_Agricultural_Company


Settlement by the British also had limited success. Hbc policy was designed to promote settlement north of the Columbia, whereas the most attractive area, the Willamette valley, lay south. Moreover, PSAC reserved all the best lands to its commercial farming enterprise. And last, but not least, British settlers were constrained by policies that favoured the Company at the expense of the settler. Farmers were to receive 1,000 acres on leasehold, 20 cows, 1 bull, 500 sheep, 8 oxen, 6 horses and a few pigs, leases to run for 5 years. Each farmer would be provisioned for the first year until his harvest came in. At the end of the lease the land and buildings would revert to the company, it would have the sole right and duty of marketing the produce, and half of the increase from the stock would belong to the company. Although this degree of 'regulation' was not at all unusual in an era of emigration largely organized by private enterprise, other destinations - particularly New Zealand - gave the PSAC/ Hbc initiative stiff competition. And there was little publicity: ironically, both companies were afraid of attracting too many emigrants!
http://www2.hbc.com/hbcheritage/