Parent company guarantees and performance bonds are typically used in the construction and engineering industries to provide a developer with some security in the event that the contractor breaches the building or engineering contract or, in some circumstances, upon the contractor's insolvency.

In the current economic climate, contractor default is, unfortunately, even more prevalent in the construction and engineering industries, and so the issues surrounding parent company guarantees and performance bonds are very much in focus for developers.

In the early nineties, Quebec adopted new personal property legislation under the reform of the Civil Code of Quebec (the "CCQ"). However, the CCQ incorporated language and legislation from Quebec's former personal property regime. This combination of old and new legislation has, in some cases, left remnants of formalism surrounding the creation of certain types of hypothecs (security interests). In Positron Technologies Inc.