Insolvency Law Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

The Companies' Creditors Arrangement Act (CCAA) has been on Canada's statute books for almost 90 years. In the last four decades the Act has been used to resolve the insolvencies of numerous large firms, including household names, such as... more

The Companies' Creditors Arrangement Act (CCAA) has been on Canada's statute books for almost 90 years. In the last four decades the Act has been used to resolve the 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 the establishment of publications like the Annual Review of Insolvency Law and its marquee conference. Yet, until recently, there has been little enquiry into the CCAA's history. Thus, my monograph, Reinventing Bankruptcy Law: A History of the Companies' Creditors Arrangement Act, published by University of Toronto Press in 2020, offers the first historical account of the 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 the twentieth-century. The book addresses the question of, "What makes the CCAA, 'the CCAA'?" The answer is, admittedly, not for the faint hearted. As Professor Anthony Duggan (University of Toronto, Faculty of Law), writes in his foreword, "the book explodes the conventional wisdom surrounding the CCAA's underlying policy objectives, and it exposes the historical errors in the more recent case law to devastating effect." This article highlights three of the book's key findings.