Accuride Canada: 35 per cent to unsecured creditors, without a plan

Firestone began manufacturing in London, Ontario in 1968 and installed presses for steel blanks there in 1983. Accuride Corporation was formed in 1986 to buy Firestone's wheel business, and Accuride Canada Inc. was incorporated on November 19, 1986, per the Moore Affidavit, Oct. 9, 2024, paras. 25–27. By 2024 the plant at 31 Firestone Boulevard was a 570,000-square-foot automated facility on 37 acres, with capacity for about 3.6 million wheels a year on a five-day week, making steel blanks on two 2,500-ton presses and single and dual steel wheels, mostly for medium-duty trucks. It had about 218 employees, 180 of them hourly workers represented by Unifor Local 27, Unit 17, per the Moore Affidavit, Oct. 9, 2024, paras. 5–6, 35–38.

The plant, in the sworn words of Charles Moore, the Accuride group's chief restructuring officer, "has consistently failed to operate at a profit for over a decade." His affidavit puts the loss before interest and tax at US$7.4 million for 2023 and about US$6.9 million for the first half of 2024. He attributes it to labour and overhead costs, a customer shift to lightweight materials the plant could not make, aging equipment, and General Motors' refusal to reprice contracts that rising material and labour costs had made unprofitable. GM took about 75% of the plant's third-party sales, and sales to the parent were about two-thirds of all sales, per the Moore Affidavit, Oct. 9, 2024, paras. 7, 10, 76–82. Accuride Corp had said it would not support its lone Canadian subsidiary after emerging from its own Chapter 11 and would outsource the blanks to third-party suppliers, per the Moore Affidavit, Oct. 9, 2024, paras. 5, 14, 85.

On July 31, 2026, nearly 22 months after the filing, Justice W.D. Black of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice (Commercial List) authorized PricewaterhouseCoopers Inc., the monitor, which had held expanded powers over the company since March 10, 2025, to pay $16,540,017 to the holders of 248 proven claims totalling $46,645,912.60, an estimated recovery of about 35%, without a plan of compromise or arrangement, per the Endorsement of Justice Black, July 31, 2026, paras. 1–3 and the Eighth Report, July 24, 2026, paras. 4–5, 34, 43.

No bidder, and a plant run down to its last orders

Accuride Canada filed under the CCAA on October 10, 2024. Accuride Corp and its U.S. affiliates had filed under Chapter 11 in Delaware the day before, under a restructuring term sheet meant to make the term lenders the new owners of the U.S. group; the Canadian company was not a Chapter 11 debtor, had no third-party funded debt, and was neither borrower nor guarantor under the parent's credit facilities, per the Endorsement of Justice Black, Oct. 11, 2024 (2024 ONSC 5548), paras. 5–6, 20. Perella Weinberg Partners had contacted 51 parties from early August; seven gave indications of interest in parts of the group, and none included the London plant, per the Moore Affidavit, Oct. 9, 2024, para. 83. By November 15, Justice Black recorded that "there has still been no interest in the acquisition of the applicant's business as a going concern," and that on November 7 the company, its parent and the monitor had told employees and union representatives at townhalls that the plant would close, per the Endorsement of Justice Black, Nov. 15, 2024, paras. 5–7.

The winddown ran on money from the plant's largest outside customer as well as from the parent. Under an accommodation agreement of November 8, 2024, GM agreed to lend up to US$4 million, to raise its prices effective from the filing date and to pay in 10 days, so the plant could finish GM's component parts; the court approved the loan and a charge ranking pari passu with Accuride Corp's intercompany-loan charge, finding the jurisdiction in s. 11 of the CCAA, per the Endorsement of Justice Black, Nov. 15, 2024, paras. 10, 12, 15. A December 3 memorandum of agreement with Unifor set winddown terms for the hourly workers, and a production and retention plan covered the salaried staff. The proposed payouts under both sit in two confidential appendices to the monitor's Third Report, which Justice Black sealed on December 12 under the Sherman Estate test, per the Endorsement of Justice Black, Dec. 12, 2024, paras. 1, 3, 6. Final production for GM and Isuzu was expected to be substantially complete by the second week of February 2025, per the Endorsement of Justice Black, Jan. 27, 2025, paras. 1–3.

After weighing a liquidation or scrap sale of its machinery, the company agreed with its landlord to leave the premises and abandon the machinery and equipment there, in return for relief from February's rent and all other occupancy costs; it sold unused dies and tooling to Accuride Corp "for de minimis value," and it terminated all of its hourly and salaried employees, per the Fifth Report of the Monitor, Mar. 21, 2025, para. 13(b)(iii)–(vii).

Where $17 million came from

At filing, the Moore affidavit counted about US$84 million owed to the Canadian company by Accuride Corp: a US$63 million promissory note dating from January 1, 2019, and about US$22 million in net receivables from the group's other intercompany dealings, per the Moore Affidavit, Oct. 9, 2024, para. 70. As an unsecured creditor in the Chapter 11, the company recovered nothing on those pre-filing loans. Written off, they produced 2024 tax losses that the monitor carried back against corporate tax paid in earlier years and against the 2024 instalments; the CRA confirmed the full refund claimed in a notice of assessment dated August 14, 2025, and the monitor agreed with the CRA to set the agency's claim for unpaid pre-filing HST against it, per the Seventh Report, Mar. 19, 2026, para. 22(b). The Eighth Report records approximately $7.5 million recovered from the CRA on the 2024 return, and about $782,000 more in HST refunds, per the Eighth Report, July 24, 2026, para. 14(g)–(h).

The post-filing intercompany account was settled on its own. Under an agreement of September 24, 2025, Accuride Corp paid US$3.0 million in two instalments and retired the intercompany loan, then about US$1.7 million, for no further cash, with mutual releases. The monitor called the settlement fair and reasonable and said it eliminated uncertainty over the quantum and enforceability of potential claims on the balances, reducing the risk of litigation, per the Sixth Report, Sept. 25, 2025, paras. 22–27. GM's loan, about US$2.6 million, was repaid on November 6, 2025 under the October 3 order, which also discharged the GM and intercompany charges, per the Seventh Report, Mar. 19, 2026, para. 13(e) n. 1, the Sixth Report, Sept. 25, 2025, para. 48 and the Distribution, Stay Extension & Fee Approval Order, Oct. 3, 2025, paras. 3, 6–7.

In the 18 weeks to July 17, 2026, the estate took in $8.72 million against $437,000 forecast, almost all of the difference being the CRA's corporate tax and HST refunds, and cash on hand reached $17,166,080, per the Eighth Report, July 24, 2026, paras. 15–16, App. A.

The surplus that went to the pensioners

The company had sponsored two defined benefit plans since December 1, 1986, when it bought the assets of Firestone Steel Products of Canada. Both were wound up effective December 31, 2022, fully funded, and once annuities had been bought from Desjardins the hourly plan was left with a surplus of about $4.7 million and the salaried plan about $460,000, before expenses, per the Seventh Report, Mar. 19, 2026, paras. 24(a)–(e), 28(a). In September 2025 the monitor proposed negotiating a share of the hourly surplus for the estate, through representative counsel for the plan's members, and noted that any portion the estate kept "will be available for distribution to unsecured creditors," per the Sixth Report, Sept. 25, 2025, paras. 32(c), 37.