Bailout is the buzzword of hope in today’s economic crisis. The courts tend to be last on troubled companies’ wish lists of saviors, and then only as the overseers in what is often a doomsday scenario in the guise of a restructuring.
But Canada may have found a better way thanks to the flexibility in the country’s restructuring legislation, the Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act (CCAA). The unique statute allowed Ontario’s courts to restructure not only a business but also an entire domestic market when Canada’s $27 billion asset-based commercial paper (ABCP) market (see “Scrutinizing Assets”) collapsed in August 2007.
