What stay extensions are actually granted

On December 2, 2025, the SSENSE Group — captioned in Montréal's commercial division as Atallah Group Inc. and five affiliates — asked the Superior Court of Québec to extend its CCAA stay of proceedings to January 30, 2026, the outside date by which the successful bid in its sale process then had to close (Application for the Issuance of a Stay Extension Order, Dec. 2, 2025, paras. 19 and 39). What it got, three days later, was December 12. The order is candid about why: the court "is not available to hear the Stay Extension Application during the week of December 5, 2025, but it is available to do so on December 12, 2025," so the stay was carried to the hearing date, on notice to the service list that the absence of a written contestation by noon on December 4 would let the order issue (Stay Extension Order, Dec. 5, 2025, paras. 3–5). Nobody filed one. On December 12, Justice Andres C. Garin extended the stay to February 19, 2026 — twenty days more than the debtors had asked for (Stay Extension Order, Dec. 12, 2025, para. 9).

The overshoot was the monitor's. Ernst & Young Inc.'s Third Report, filed the day before the hearing, disclosed that the terms and conditions of the binding offers received in the sale process "were not currently acceptable," recommended rejecting all of them, and relaunched the process with a best-and-final deadline of December 23 and an outside closing date of February 13, 2026. The January 30 the debtors had applied for nine days earlier was already stale. "In light of the Relaunched SISP timeline and the Third Revised Cash Flow Forecast," the report reads, "the Monitor recommends that the stay of proceedings be extended until February 19th, 2026" (Third Report of the Monitor, Dec. 11, 2025, paras. 45–47 and 66). The court took the recommendation to the day.

Nothing in the statute produces those numbers. Since the 2019 amendments, s. 11.02 of the CCAA fixes one duration and no other: the stay in an initial order cannot exceed ten days. An extension may run "for any period that the court considers necessary," on a two-part showing — that circumstances exist that make the order appropriate, and that the applicant has acted, and is acting, in good faith and with due diligence. On how long is long enough, the Act says nothing at all. What fills that silence sits in the orders themselves, and SSENSE, which ran from its first interim order on August 29, 2025 to a six-minute stay extension hearing on May 11, 2026, is the cleanest specimen of how the filling gets done.

The company came into court at scale. Founded in 2003 by Rami, Firas and Bassel Atallah, "three brothers residing in Montreal," the luxury e-commerce retailer was valued at CA$5 billion in 2021, the year Sequoia Capital took a minority stake; by 2025 its revenues had fallen to CA$1.0 billion from CA$1.3 billion the year before, 95.5% of that through the website and the mobile app, with the one physical store — a flagship in Old Montreal — carrying 1.5% (Report of the Proposed Monitor, Sept. 12, 2025, paras. 5, 8, 22 and 24). Its syndicated credit facilities matured on August 24, 2025, the lending syndicate advised that it would neither refinance them nor extend the maturity, and it was the syndicate — not the company — that filed the first CCAA application, on August 27 (Report of the Proposed Monitor, Sept. 12, 2025, paras. 14–15). The debtors filed their own two weeks after that, and the Initial Order of September 12, 2025 granted the statutory maximum: a stay to September 22, ten days (Initial Order, Sept. 12, 2025, para. 24).

Then the boundary began to move, and every move carries its reason on the face of the instrument that moved it. September 22 to September 26, four days, because the court "is not available to schedule the 'comeback hearing' on September 22, 2025, but it is available to do so on September 26, 2025" (Stay Extension Order, Sept. 22, 2025, para. 2). September 26 to December 5, seventy days, the runway the amended and restated initial order gave the sale process (Amended and Restated Initial Order, Sept. 26, 2025, para. 26). Then the December sequence above: seven days for the court's diary, sixty-nine on the monitor's revised calendar. After the sale was approved on February 4, 2026 and the closing conditions were satisfied on February 13 (Application for the Issuance of a Stay Extension Order, Feb. 17, 2026, paras. 19 and 21), the next extension ran eighty-five days, to May 15, sized to a transition services agreement — it "will allow for the Debtors to provide services to the Purchaser during the 3-month period contemplated by the TSA" (Fifth Report of the Monitor, Feb. 18, 2026, para. 60). And on May 11, 2026, at a hearing that opened at 14:08 and closed at 14:14, Justice Luc Morin granted the monitor's own application for 119 days more, to September 11, sought among other reasons to "avoid a return to Court for the sole purpose of obtaining a further extension of the stay of proceedings" (Seventh Report of the Monitor, May 7, 2026, para. 55.4). The minutes record what the court made of that: "In practical terms, this extension should be the final stay of proceedings" (Minutes to May 11th, 2026 Hearing and Stay Extension Order, May 11, 2026, p. 2).

One case, seven boundaries: 10 days, then 4, 70, 7, 69, 85 and 119. None of them is a round number. Each is the date of the next thing that had to happen — a hearing the court could offer, a bid deadline, an outside date, the end of a transition period, the last trip to court anyone wanted to make. Six other files, in three provinces, from a diamond mine's demolition tender to a stay renewed in steps as short as a day, run on the same mechanics.

The long end of the range is far longer than the statute's ten-day opening suggests. In KMC Mining Corporation's CCAA — Court of King's Bench of Alberta at Edmonton, file 2503 00016, continued out of a BIA notice of intention on January 10, 2025 — Justice G.S. Dunlop on May 15, 2026 extended a stay due to expire on June 30, 2026 to June 30, 2027: a full year in a single order (Order (Enhanced Monitor's Powers and Extending the Stay Period), May 15, 2026, para. 2). The business was long gone — the sale closed on May 2, 2025 for proceeds of more than $100 million — and KMC was down to roughly five employees from ninety-two. What remains is a lawsuit. Suncor Energy Inc., KMC's "most significant, if not only, customer" for several decades, "abruptly cancelled various work … without known cause," the company says; counsel puts the damages "in the tens of millions of dollars," and "the only material manner in which creditors will see further recovery is through the Suncor litigation" (Application (Enhanced Monitor's Powers and Extended Stay Period), May 6, 2026, paras. 9–10, 16–17, 20–23 and 34). The order is built to that horizon: FTI Consulting Canada Inc., as monitor, may carry on the business and stop carrying it on; the stay is lifted as against Suncor alone so the action can proceed; and reporting drops to annual, the next report due June 30, 2027 — the day the stay expires (Order, May 15, 2026, paras. 3, 5(b) and 10).

Stornoway Diamonds runs the same late-case clock at a shorter stride. Extraction and milling at the Renard mine concluded on January 28, 2025 and the site went into "cold care and maintenance mode"; Winsome Resources Ltd., which held a call option over it, gave notice on February 17 extending the option to August 31, 2025 for a further $8,500,000 (Application for an Order extending the Stay of Proceedings and an Approval Order, Feb. 20, 2025, paras. 13, 15–16 and 20). Justice Karen M. Rogers moved the stay from February 28 to September 30, 2025: 214 days, the option window and a month (Order extending the Stay of Proceedings, Feb. 24, 2025, para. 7). Winsome did not exercise. By 2026 the debtors had "definitively ceased operations" and the applicant is the officer: Deloitte Restructuring Inc., empowered since September 2025 to act in lieu of the debtors, asked on May 21, 2026 for 97 days more while four dismantlers' proposals awaited selection and a restoration plan awaited two Québec ministries (Application for an Order extending the Stay of Proceedings, May 21, 2026, paras. 3(h), 6, 7–8 and 10). Justice Rogers granted it four days later, no objection having been served (Stay Extension Order, May 25, 2026, paras. 4 and 11).

Enerkem shows how little ceremony a pure wind-down takes. What is left before the court is what a reverse vesting sale left behind: two numbered ResidualCos and the partnership that ran a "commercial-scale demonstration biorefinery in Edmonton … which was retired as of January 20, 2024" (Application for a Stay Extension, Nov. 12, 2025, paras. 11, 13, 14 and 21–22). The stay now moves on paper alone: 179 days to May 15, 2026, then 138 more to September 30. Justice Céline Legendre's order of November 17, 2025 recites that it is "appropriate and economical to extend the Stay Period," and the "absence of any contestation or objection" before the objection deadline (Order Extending the Stay of Proceedings, Nov. 17, 2025, paras. 4, 6 and 10); her order of May 15, 2026 adds that "in the circumstances, a hearing is not necessary in order to issue the order sought" (Order Extending the Stay of Proceedings, May 15, 2026, paras. 5, 8 and 11). What is being paced is environmental: discussions with the City of Edmonton and Alberta Environment and Protected Areas, a Phase II site assessment, and then "the dismantling of the Alberta Plant" (Fifth Report of the Monitor, May 8, 2026, para. 59).

Pétromont is where the stay and the money are one decision. The company stopped turning hydrocarbons into ethylene and propylene at Varennes and Montréal-Est in January 2009 (First Report of the Proposed Monitor, Mar. 7, 2025, para. 9); the proceedings opened in March 2025 are an environmental wind-down of the land it left. On June 22, 2026 Justice Martin F. Sheehan moved the stay from June 27 to December 19, 2026 and, in the same order, raised the interim facility to $2,200,000 and the lenders' charge to $2,640,000 (Order Extending the Stay of Proceedings and Increasing the Interim Financing Facility, June 22, 2026, paras. 11–13). His reasons tie the two together: newly identified contamination at Varennes needs some $1,385,000 of remediation the lenders have agreed to fund, and "in the absence of an increase in the authorization, the CCAA Parties will run out of liquidity by December 19, 2026" [translation]. The file is adjourned to November 30 — nineteen days before either the stay or the money runs out (Judgment on the Application Extending the Stay of Proceedings and Increasing the Interim Financing, June 22, 2026, paras. 22–23, 32 and 35). The same sentence, with January 17, 2026 in it, had set the extension before (Judgment, Sept. 29, 2025, para. 28).

When a lender's confidence goes, the same machinery runs the other way. ClearPier Acquisition Corp. and 1000238820 Ontario Inc. — Ontario's Commercial List, file CV-25-00740088-00CL, holding companies for performance advertising businesses in Israel and Portugal — got ten days on their own motion in late September 2025, a stay to October 10 (Order (Stay Extension), Sept. 26, 2025, para. 3). The next motion was not theirs. Export Development Canada, the senior secured creditor, brought it, on the ground that management's failure to deliver wind-down plans had "resulted in a complete loss of confidence in existing management's conduct of this CCAA proceeding" (Notice of Motion (Stay Extension and Monitor's Enhanced Powers), Oct. 6, 2025, para. 18). Justice Conway's order of October 9 gave three weeks, and gave Richter Inc., the monitor, the subsidiaries' shareholder rights and the applicants' bank accounts, "to the exclusion of all other Persons, including the Applicants" (Order (Stay Extension and Monitor's Enhanced Powers), Oct. 9, 2025, paras. 3–4). Every extension after that was the monitor's, and each ran longer than the last — 61 days, 90, then 122 to July 31, 2026, while a share sale approved in December worked through an Israeli Tax Authority investigation that had already passed its February 16, 2026 outside date (Seventh Report of the Monitor Richter Inc., Mar. 24, 2026, paras. 22 and 30; Order (Stay Extension), Mar. 31, 2026, para. 3).

At the far end sits Duchesne et Fils Ltée, a maker of construction materials founded in 1927 — polyethylene film, nails, metal mesh, drawn wire, sheet metal — from a plant at Yamachiche, in the Mauricie, employing 144 people (Motion for the Issuance of an Initial Order, Jan. 13, 2026, paras. 2–3 and 19–20). After a stay period running to April 17, 2026, Justice David R. Collier renewed it in increments of seven days, six, one, five and one: five orders that bought twenty days between them. The first short ask was the debtor's own — the interim lenders "informed the Monitor that they needed more time to take a position on the offers received" [translation] (Motion for a Stay Extension Order, Apr. 15, 2026, paras. 11–12). Two of the five bought a single day each. April 30's issued because Ernst & Young Inc., as monitor, advised that a short extension was needed "to allow completion of certain steps relating to the sale of the Debtor's assets" [translation] (Troisième Ordonnance de Prolongation, Apr. 30, 2026, para. 4); May 6's exists because the approval-and-vesting, liquidation and directions motions had been adjourned to May 7 [translation] (Ordonnance de Prolongation, May 6, 2026, para. 3). A sixth order carried the stay 29 days to June 5 (Ordonnance modifiant l'Ordonnance initiale amendée et reformulée, May 7, 2026, paras. 11–12), and on June 5 the court ended the proceedings: the stay now runs to the earlier of August 31, 2026 and the monitor's certificate closing the file, and Ernst & Young Inc. may assign the debtor into bankruptcy and act as its trustee (Ordonnance modifiant l'Ordonnance initiale amendée et reformulée … et mettant fin aux procédures LACC, June 5, 2026, paras. 13 and 14).

Read together, the seven files say three things the statute does not. The length of an extension is the distance to the next fixed point in the case's own calendar — a hearing the court can offer, a bid deadline, an option window, a transition period, a remediation season, a litigation horizon — and these courts sized to it whether it measured one day or three hundred and sixty-five. The evidence that carries the order is the court officer's: in SSENSE the court took the monitor's date over the debtors' own, in Pétromont the expiry is the day the monitor's forecast says the money stops, and in Stornoway, Enerkem and SSENSE's last extension the officer is the one asking. And the identity of whoever moves is itself a reading of the case — debtors move early, officers move late, and a secured creditor moving for a stay extension, as Export Development Canada did in ClearPier, is moving for something else in the same motion.