In the case of Bankruptcy Hanson, 2022 ONSC 6591,^[1] the Ontario Superior Court of Justice dealt with access to insurance proceeds in the case of a bankrupt professional. The key questions to be decided by the Court were:

The Alberta Court of King's Bench (the Court) has confirmed that the abandonment and reclamation obligations owed to the Orphan Well Association (OWA) and the Alberta Energy Regulator (AER) rank in priority to claims of municipalities for unpaid property taxes in insolvency proceedings.

Flight v. Leblanc 2022 ONCA 831, argued by Lucy Sun and Jason Squire of Lerners, involved an interesting intersection of limitations law and insolvency practice. We were retained by the respondent on the appeal of a summary judgment motion dismissing the action (we did not act at first instance).

Commercial insolvency can affect stakeholders located in multiple jurisdictions and possessing diverse legal rights. A recent notable trend in Canadian insolvency law is the centralization in insolvency proceedings, where courts have recognized that an effective restructuring of an insolvent business may depend on the centralization of stakeholder claims in a single proceeding. This applies even when such an approach would be inconsistent with the parties’ contractual rights, statutory laws or Canada’s federal structure outside of the insolvency context.

Since we last discussed the then-novel restructuring mechanism known as the reverse vesting order (RVO) in 2020, insolvency professionals have been seeking, and courts have been approving, this facilitative remedy with greater frequency.

In the recent decision of Chin v Beauty Express Canada Inc. (“Chin”), the Ontario Superior Court of Justice considered the impact of an employee’s service with a prior employer on the employee’s entitlement to reasonable notice of termination.

Following are this week’s summaries of the Court of Appeal for Ontario for the week of November 14, 2022.

On November 10, 2022, the Supreme Court of Canada (the "SCC") released its long-awaited decision in Peace River Hydro Partners v Petrowest Corp., 2022 SCC 41(“Peace River”), which addresses the interaction between insolvency law's single proceeding model and arbitration law’s emphasis on contractually bargained-for rights – an interaction often described as “a conflict of near polar extremes”.

Bursting the Crypto Bubble and the Financial Turbulence Ahead With the FTX Group’s recent Chapter 11 filing, on the heels of the recent Celsius Network LLC Chapter 11 filing, we have entered what could be described as a “Lehman Brothers moment” for the crypto industry. This observation, together with the recent awarding of the Nobel Prize in Economics to former Federal Reserve chair Ben Bernanke and professors Douglas Diamond and Philip Dybvig for their pioneering research on banks and financial crises, has caused some of us to experience a déjà vu moment.

In a unanimous decision, with concurring reasons, the Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) has rendered its long-anticipated judgment regarding the intersection of insolvency and domestic arbitration law in Peace River Hydro Partners v. Petrowest Corp., 2022 SCC 41.