Determining the purpose and objectives of long-standing and established federal insolvency systems has generally not been difficult. The same cannot be said for federal receivership provisions. The Supreme Court of Canada undertook a search for the purpose behind these federal receivership provisions in Saskatchewan (Attorney General) v Lemare Lake Logging Ltd, 2015 SCC 53. That case, which has cast doubt on whether receivership law should be characterized as a federal insolvency system, serves as the central focus of this paper. The author seeks to explain how and why this questioning of receivership law has come to pass, and considers its future implications.

This paper is part of a collection presented at LESA’s 2016 The Constitution in the Insolvency Tool Box program.