Over the past week, Canadian department store giant Hudson’s Bay Company filed for creditor protection (the country’s equivalent of bankruptcy) and announced plans to liquidate its 80 stores and lay off more than 9,000 employees. Unless a white-knight investor swoops in unexpectedly, Hudson’s Bay will be added to the surprisingly long list of Canadian retail brands that have closed, collapsed and gone out of business over the past decade. Virtually all of these companies have played in the home sector, which raises the question: Why is it so damn hard for a retailer to succeed in Canada?

Hudson’s Bay is a Canadian institution, claiming to be the oldest continually operating retailer in North America, with a founding date of 1670 and origins that trace back to the beaver pelt traders of the frontier days. Recently, the brand has been owned by American real estate wheeler-dealer Richard Baker, who has one of the worst track records in all of retailing—having crashed and burned a number of nameplates, including Lord & Taylor and Fortunoff, as well as the Canadian home specialty chain Home Outfitters.

Baker also made some ill-fated investments in the European department store Kaufhof and the onetime designer flash-sale darling Gilt Groupe (which still exists, albeit in a watered-down off-price format, and which Baker ultimately sold at a loss of $150 million). In December, Baker bought Neiman Marcus for $2.7 billion, merging it with Saks Fifth Avenue to create a new entity called Saks Global. In doing so, he split Saks Global off from the Hudson’s Bay Company, setting up the latter’s creditor protection filing and eventual dissolution.

The Bay—as every Canadian calls it—has been a full-line department store with a complete home assortment, including furniture, home textiles, housewares and tabletop. In the absence of any other department store, it was the de facto nameplate for shoppers.

Eaton’s, which had once been a competitor, was bought by Sears Canada—back when there was a Sears Canada—in a mismatched mashup that became a casualty of the slow but steady death spiral of the overall Sears operation.

Other department stores that have had brief runs in Canada include Saks itself—which didn’t last very long—as well as Nordstrom, which opened its first stores there in 2014, eventually operating six full-line units and seven Rack stores. Less than a decade later, the company shut them all down, saying the business wasn’t performing.

The most infamous Canadian import was Target’s less-than-two-year trip north, when it bought the Zeller’s leases (from Hudson’s Bay Company, allowing Baker to claim he made tons of money buying the company). When Brian Cornell took over Target in 2014, one of his first moves was to shut down Canada operations, a very expensive hit. Talk about ripping off the Band-Aid.

Other Canadian casualties? When Bed Bath & Beyond liquidated its entire business two years ago, about 25 of the Canadian locations were sold, and most reopened as Rooms + Spaces. In less than a year, virtually all of them were shuttered, and the two remaining locations are essentially departments within sister brand Toys R Us stores. Coming on top of the Home Outfitters shutdown, it essentially left the country without a national home specialty chain.

Not that there haven’t been exceptions to the rule of Canadian retail failures. Walmart entered the market in 1994 with about 120 stores and now has more than 400. In January it announced a $4.5 billion investment in its Canadian division with plans to open dozens of new stores. Clearly it is doing well, and just as clearly, it is taking market share as competitors fall by the wayside.

In fairness, not all of these failures were due to the particulars of the Canadian market. Many of the parent companies involved—Sears, HBC, BBB—had problems that crossed the border. But the country continues to bedevil retailers of all shapes and sizes.

So, what’s the problem? The most obvious is the size of the market: Canada’s population is just about 40 million, barely 12 percent of that of the U.S. It is heavily centered near the border, in the Toronto-to-Montreal track, with population pockets out west in Vancouver, Calgary and Edmonton. It’s a tough map to navigate.

The Canadian population may also not skew quite as upscale as in the U.S., which helps explain the department store’s demise as well as Walmart’s success.

And let’s not forget that the track record of U.S. stores expanding internationally has been pretty dismal overall. Walmart, with successes in Canada and Mexico, has exited the U.K., Germany and Japan, while struggling in China. Several other American brands have left Asian and European markets over the past few decades. And all of this predates any of the political and tariff-related complications of the present.

Are there opportunities in Canada for home furnishings retailers? Looking at the void there, one would think that there are. But how to fill it seems to be the tricky part. Just ask Target, HBC, and a long, long list of victims who’d rather not talk about it anymore.

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Warren Shoulberg is the former editor in chief for several leading B2B publications. He has been a guest lecturer at the Columbia University Graduate School of Business; received honors from the International Furnishings and Design Association and the Fashion Institute of Technology; and been cited by The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN and other media as a leading industry expert. His Retail Watch columns offer deep industry insights on major markets and product categories.