Reflections on the Evolution of the Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act

Abstract

The Companies' Creditors Arrangement Act (CCAA) has been on Canada's statute books for almost 90 years. In last four decades Act has been used to resolve insolvencies of numerous large firms, including household names, such as Air Canada, Algoma Steel, Eaton's, Sears Canada, Target Canada, Canwest Global Communications, and DavidsTea, to name a few. In that same timeframe insolvency practice has developed into a robust field, leading to establishment of publications like Annual Review of Insolvency Law and its marquee conference. Yet, until recently, there has been little enquiry into CCAA's history. Thus, my monograph, Reinventing Bankruptcy Law: A History of Companies' Creditors Arrangement Act, published by University of Toronto Press in 2020, offers first historical account of origins and development of Canada's premier corporate restructuring regime. Reinventing Bankruptcy Law uses several lenses of analysis, including law, history, political science, and sociology, to provide a multi-dimensional narrative of legal change in Canadian corporate restructuring law over twentieth-century. The book addresses question of, What makes CCAA, 'the CCAA'? The answer is, admittedly, not for faint hearted. As Professor Anthony Duggan (University of Toronto, Faculty of Law), writes in his foreword, the book explodes conventional wisdom surrounding CCAA's underlying policy objectives, and it exposes historical errors in more recent case law to devastating effect. This article highlights three of book's key findings.