Insights
The archive, newest first — posts 176–200 of 245. The 8 most recent are on the front. ← The newest analysis
Filing brief
Paystone: the bidder who has to help the other bidders
Justice Myers refused Paystone's non-arm's-length prepack in June, on the ground that management was to receive value for equity a balance-sheet insolvency says is worthless. On July 10 he approved a sale process run by the Monitor instead — one in which management may bid, and must hand over the information its competitors will use.
Paystone Holdings Inc., Paystone Inc., Atom Growth Inc. and Atom Growth (USA), Inc.
Filing brief
Sirona Pharma: the licence could not be sold, so the company was
Health Canada suspended Sirona Pharma's cannabis licence in September 2025 and the business stopped. The licence came back in May. The Monitor's sale process sent 113 teasers, admitted nine parties to a data room and produced no viable third-party offer — and the reverse vesting order it filed on July 6 asks the court to sell the company itself, because the licence cannot be moved.
Precedent note
Synaptive: the employer nobody worked for
Synaptive's reverse vesting order moved 48 terminated employees' contracts into a company that had never employed anyone, and that company then went bankrupt. The Attorney General argued this meant no Wage Earner Protection benefits, because nobody had ever worked there. On July 7 Justice Dietrich held that a court order is itself enough to form the employment relationship.
Filing brief
Lions Village: the entrance fee that did not come back
Seniors paid entrance fees to a registered charity for life leases in three Edmonton retirement communities. When they died or moved out, the applicants say, the money was not returned — and since 2024 Alberta law has required 9% interest on it, paid monthly. On July 6 they asked the Court of King's Bench to hand the society to BDO.
Outcome brief
Dosanjh Care: what a secured creditor is not required to wait for
A care facility closed by government order two years before the receiver arrived. Its owner produced a 2022 appraisal valuing the business at $3.28 million and argued the sale was not value-maximising. On July 9 Justice Myers set out what a creditor holding secured collateral need not do first — and found the lawsuit she wanted continued had been started without authority.
Outcome brief
Boutique le Pentagone: $200,000, from the creditor already owed $2.2 million
Boutique Le Pentagone filed a notice of intention in December, liquidated inventory under court guidelines, disclaimed leases and took three extensions. On July 9 a registrar of the Superior Court approved its proposal — funded entirely by a $200,000 investment from a creditor whose own claim for unpaid rent and advances is estimated at $2,224,000.
Outcome brief
Versante Hotel: six-month money, and the loan that carried it into receivership
Richmond's luxury boutique Versante traded through foreclosure, receivership, a $48-million sale that failed twice, and its operating company's bankruptcy. Deloitte's discharge report closes the file on a $35.8-million bridge loan at a shortfall of over $80 million.
International Trade Center Properties Ltd., RCC Holdings Ltd., and Hotel Versante Ltd.
Filing brief
XTM: a float of other people's tips
XTM's EveryDay Platform paid gratuities to hospitality workers in real time, funded by merchants' pre-authorized debits into a float XTM held. By September 2025 that float was short approximately $18.75 million, for reasons still not determined. On July 6 Justice Black decided who bears $1.5 million of chargebacks taken after the stay — and largely preferred the banks.
Filing brief
Auberge du Lac Sacacomie: the offer that would cover every debt
A 106-room log resort on Lac Sacacomie with 137 staff, whose 2020 sales were barely a quarter of pre-pandemic levels — which cost it the renovations that would have brought guests back. It has been under contract repeatedly since 2020 without a deal closing. The letter of intent now before the court would pay its debts in full, and it needs $1 million to reach the closing date.
Filing brief
One Properties Paramount: an empty theatre on Jasper Avenue
The Paramount has been dark. Its owner's receiver took possession last September, fielded the City of Edmonton's correspondence about graffiti and loitering, and marketed four addresses unpriced for six months to 777 online viewers. On June 29 it asked the court to approve an unconditional sale — against $9,086,012 owed to National Bank and $254,651 of unpaid property taxes to the city.
Filing brief
Bold Canine: the whole facility, in ten days
A frozen raw pet food plant was locked out of its own factory on June 12 over unpaid rent. The creditor who is not first in line reinstated the lease, then funded a $350,000 interim receivership — payroll, critical vendors, raw meat, and liquid nitrogen to keep the freezers running. By July 5 the entire facility was drawn. Tomorrow the court decides whether it continues, and the creditor who IS first is having the assets appraised.
Outcome brief
Premier Health: the part Québec did not close
Bill 10 capped the rates. Then the Autorité des marchés publics struck four of Premier Health of America's subsidiaries off the public-contract register for five years, citing integrity breaches, and the company's Québec business was over by December. What survived was the federal work — nurses staffed into Indigenous and remote communities — and on July 3 the Superior Court signed it over to Bayshore's parent by reverse vesting order, eleven days after the company's own bank put it into the CCAA.
Case update
AlphaBow: the monitor asked the bank
A sale failed to close in June because the company did not post a $9,053,918 security deposit with the regulator. Its counsel withdrew, its only officer resigned, and nobody answered. So the monitor went directly to BMO — and found $4,076.87 in an account that its own reporting had shown holding about $9 million.
Filing brief
ANS 1993: the receiver may not run the daycares
Royal Bank of Canada asked the Court of King's Bench to appoint a receiver and manager over six Alberta companies operating five child-care centres in Edmonton and Spruce Grove, on $5.8 million of defaulted debt and a forbearance whose very first $50,000 payment was never made. On July 2 Justice Lema appointed an interim receiver instead — one expressly forbidden from operating the daycares, but holding the keys to every bank account.
Case update
Crystallex: eighty-eight per cent, and what the unsealed record shows
Fourteen years into a CCAA, Crystallex is running a claims process that invites its own shareholders to file — because a US$1.2 billion arbitration award against Venezuela and a US$5.89 billion Delaware sale have made the estate potentially solvent. To run it, the court ordered the sealed record opened. On July 1 thirty-two confidential monitor's reports were released unredacted, and the disclosure compendium filed in May sets out the waterfall: the litigation funder's contingent share is 88.242% of the net proceeds.
Case update
Sonder: the last asset was the name
The leases went in December, the furniture with them, and by January the bankrupt Canadian Sonder entities had nothing material left but domain names and trademarks. Selling them meant running a solicitation process the estates' own inspectors were disqualified from touching — because the party they represent was one of the bidders the trustee intended to approach.
Case update
Baffinland: what the noteholders got for standing down
Ottawa offered Baffinland's iron mine a $400 million DIP. Its existing secured lenders — Oaktree, Hartree and an ad hoc committee of 8.750% noteholders — cross-moved with a rival facility of their own, and the court gave the government a four-week bridge and a litigation timetable instead of an answer. Cross-examinations had begun when the parties settled. On June 30 Madam Justice Steele approved the deal, and what the lenders took in exchange for dropping their opposition is not money.
Case update
1680 Brimley: the receiver wants the $24 million back
A $70 million land loan on 4.42 acres in Scarborough, approved for four towers and 1,591 units. When the receiver was appointed it found an open excavation with no insurance on it, books and records it still has not been given, and $24 million that had left the debtor's bank accounts for a related company before the proceedings began.
Case update
Mirror Trading International: thirty-one names, and then all of them
Mirror Trading International took at least 39,193 Bitcoin from some 304,040 people in 234 countries before South Africa wound it up. Its liquidators have chased the money through thirteen jurisdictions. In Alberta, a national receiver was appointed in April over the Bitcoin held by thirty-one Canadians — the largest recipients. On June 29 the receiver asked the court to widen that to every Canadian who took a payout, roughly 1,550 people holding 951.9 Bitcoin, and to be allowed to serve them all by email.
Case update
New Century Greenhouses: twelve vehicles, by serial number
Six commercial greenhouses around Redcliff, Alberta went into receivership on May 5. Seven weeks later the receiver still did not have the bank statements, the payroll records, or the keys — so on June 29 it obtained an order compelling the companies and their three guarantors to produce all of it within ten days, down to the location of twelve vehicles listed by VIN.
Case update
Jefferson Side Road: the receiver moves against the principal
Two and a half years into a receivership over a 96-unit Richmond Hill townhome project, the receiver asked the court to declare the debtors' principal a vexatious litigant — and to enjoin him from circulating the confidential list of minimum prices below which units cannot be sold without a hearing.
2011836 Ontario Corp. and Jefferson Properties Limited Partnership
Case update
Long Run: the facility leaked, and then was given up
The Orphan Well Association applied for this receivership. In March a loading line at a shut-in facility in northern Alberta froze and broke, and hydrocarbons spread downhill off lease onto a neighbour's land — a clean-up now costing about $2.75 million. Three weeks later the receiver issued a limited discharge certificate covering that facility along with every other unsold licensed asset.
Filing brief
Entourage Health: the lender is also the owner
A union pension fund put equity into a cannabis company in 2019, kept lending, bought out the bank, and took all the shares in 2025. By June 2026 it was owed about $240.1 million by a company it owns — and it applied to put that company into CCAA. The process now being built exists largely to prove it is not being run for the applicant's benefit.
Case update
Teal Jones: what is left is British Columbia
Teal-Jones filed in April 2024 with fifteen entities and mills on both sides of the border. Two years and twenty-seven monitor's reports later, the American mills are sold, the monitor has been replaced once and had its powers expanded, and it now files the applications itself. On June 26 Justice Weatherill extended the stay to July 31 and approved another amendment to the facility keeping the lights on — the eighth such extension. What remains to sell is the business the company started as.
Case update
Canacol: hardship was inevitable, so the court allocated it
A Calgary judge has held that long-term Colombian gas supply contracts are not eligible financial contracts, and may be disclaimed under s. 32 of the CCAA. Along the way he found that the hardship the counterparties complained of belonged to their customers rather than to them, that a shortfall was coming either way, and that a pipeline company facing an empty pipe was not credible in claiming hardship.