I'll try to answer you in as general a way as I can.
What effectively happens is that certain contracts can be abolished or terminated in a CCAA restructuring and certain of them can't. It largely depends on the circumstances and what types of contracts you're talking about. Some contracts are more sacrosanct than others, among them collective bargaining agreements. Things like commercial leases of property tend to be easier to disclaim or terminate in a restructuring. It very much depends on the type of contract.
From a broader perspective, though, what happens in a CCAA, or what's intended to happen in a pristine restructuring, is that the company--in a streamlined version, but the same company with the same employment force--goes forward having shed some debt that it couldn't deal with. Of course, the exception is always the rule. What you get as you try to do the restructuring is an attempt at cherry-picking the contracts that will work and the contracts that won't. Sometimes contracts even get put on the table that maybe the company didn't like to begin with, five years before, but there wasn't an opportunity until now. Now they do, because the restructuring opens everything up to negotiation.
But in its pure form, the company should go forward with as much of the workforce as possible. What happens in the real world, though, is that that's a business choice, and the due diligence people, when they're doing the lending and when they're doing the restructuring, will sharpen their pencils and say, “This is where we have to cut.” And you never know where the cuts are going to be without looking at the individual cases--on the workforce side or on the debt side.
