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.