The lender as applicant

On July 17, 2026, Findev Lending Inc. asked the Ontario Superior Court to grant CCAA protection to a company that owed it money, and then asked for less than it was entitled to.

Justice Myers set out the position in three sentences. The debtor was insolvent and, for all intents and purposes, out of business, but it had sixty-five houses left to sell. The applicant was funding the process. And then: "The Applicant has proposed no DIP charge for its borrowings. It proposes an Admin charge behind the mortgagees in priority. The Applicant will keep the mortgagees current and has entered into forbearance agreements with the first two mortgagees," per Endorsement of Justice Myers, July 17, 2026, paras. 1–2.

A lender in that position had a simpler option. Section 243 of the BIA and section 101 of the Courts of Justice Act would have given it a receiver over the same assets, with a receiver's charge ranking first and no stay protecting the borrower from anybody. Instead it applied under the CCAA, left the mortgagees outside the stay entirely, put the administration charge in fourth place, and undertook to pay the senior mortgages as they fell due out of its own pocket, per Initial Order, July 17, 2026, paras. 24–25.

Justice Myers' comment on that choice is the reason this note exists: the applicant "not taking an aggressive stand seeking all manner of priming charges establishes in my mind a very reasonable approach," per Endorsement of Justice Myers, July 17, 2026, p. 3.

The creditor-initiated CCAA is not new, and it is not rare. This record holds ten CCAA proceedings commenced since 2025 on the application of a bank, credit union, private debt fund or mortgage lender rather than of the debtor — a count of our own dockets, not a market statistic. What is worth a professional's attention is not the frequency. It is that these applicants are asking for very different things once the order is granted, and getting them.

Findev Lending — subordinate everything

Ontario, initial order July 17, 2026, Albert Gelman Inc. as monitor. The debtor is a townhouse developer with sixty-five unsold units out of a 147-unit project.

Three registered charges sit on the units, and their holders — Windsor Family Credit Union Limited, Firm Capital Mortgage Fund Inc. and Westmount Guarantee Services Inc. — are named "Unaffected Secured Creditors" in the order. The stay does not apply to them, and nothing in the order affects their rights and remedies. The administration charge ranks fourth against all property of the debtor and its proceeds, subordinated to those three registered charges by instrument number — Windsor Family Credit Union's of June 13, 2022, Firm Capital's of July 30, 2025 and Westmount's of October 21, 2020 — and subordinate as well to the indebtedness each secures. There is no interim lender's charge in the order, because the applicant sought none, per Initial Order, July 17, 2026, paras. 15, 24–25.

The applicant also carries the senior debt service itself, undertaking to keep the mortgagees current rather than have the estate do it, per Endorsement of Justice Myers, July 17, 2026, para. 2.

Three other postures

Fiera Private Debt Fund VI — the full stack

Alberta, initial order June 29, 2026 before Justice Johnston, on the application of Fiera Private Debt Fund VI LP through its general partner.

Here the priority schedule is the conventional one, and it is stated in three ranked lines: first the administration charge, initially to a maximum of $500,000; second the interim lender's charge, initially to a maximum of $3,500,000 plus all interest; third the directors' and officers' charge, initially to a maximum of $185,000, per Initial Order, June 29, 2026, para. 40.

One detail in that order is worth lifting out. The administration charge secures the professional fees of the Monitor, the Monitor's counsel, counsel to the management signatories — and counsel to the applicant. The same four are the "Administration Charge Beneficiaries" whose accounts the CCAA parties are directed to pay monthly, and who may retain pre-filing retainers as additional security, per Initial Order, June 29, 2026, paras. 31, 33. It is the applicant's counsel rather than the applicant, so the loan itself is not advanced in priority — but the cost of running the enforcement is, in first position, ahead of the interim lender's charge and everything below it.

National Bank of Canada — the order held in reserve

Alberta, February 4, 2026, over eight companies in the Green Impact group, with Ernst & Young Inc. as monitor.

The Court granted the order and then suspended it. Paragraphs 6 through 55 were not to come into force until 11:59 p.m. Mountain time on February 17, and would not come into force at all if the bank's counsel filed a certificate by 4:00 p.m. that day confirming the indebtedness had been repaid in full. The debt was not repaid; at 11:59 p.m. the monitor's appointment began, per Third Report of the Monitor, July 14, 2026, paras. 1–4.

That is a CCAA order deployed as a demand letter with a deadline attached — thirteen days in which the borrower could have made the entire proceeding disappear by paying. It is the most aggressive posture of the four and the one least visible from the outside, because a reader of the docket sees only an initial order dated February 4 and a monitor appointed on the 17th.

What followed was a lender-shaped process. The solicitation process carried no fixed deadlines, leaving the Monitor to set them in its business judgment; it was directed at one division only, the Water Assets; both deadlines it did set were later moved with the bank's consent; and the transaction that emerged sells the shares of the single subsidiary whose operations are those assets, at a price sealed in a confidential supplement, per Third Report of the Monitor, July 14, 2026, paras. 25–32.

The bank's own recovery is explicit. Its indebtedness stood at approximately $25,100,000 as at July 14, 2026, its counsel obtained a security opinion confirming validity, perfection and priority in Alberta and British Columbia, and the Monitor sought authority to make an interim distribution to it from the sale proceeds, per Third Report of the Monitor, July 14, 2026, paras. 59–62.

Royal Bank of Canada — speed

Québec. RBC filed its application on June 22, 2026 in its capacity as secured creditor, seeking both an initial order and an amended and restated one; FTI Consulting Canada Inc. issued its pre-filing report the same day; the initial order issued June 23, per First Report of the Monitor, July 2, 2026, paras. 1–3.

Ten days after the initial order, on July 3, 2026, three approval and reverse vesting orders issued over three separate business units, together with a discharge order and an amended and restated initial order, per Approval and Reverse Vesting Order (CHCA), July 3, 2026. A creditor-driven filing to three completed reverse vestings inside a fortnight is the fastest sequence in this group by a wide margin.

The axis that matters

Set the four side by side and the variable is not the statute, the province or the officer. It is how much of the estate's first-ranking capacity the applicant reserves for itself.

Two things follow from that, and neither is a prediction.

The first is that a creditor-applicant's priority ask is now a live negotiating variable rather than a form. Findev's order and Fiera's order were granted eighteen days apart in different provinces, and one of them contains no interim lender's charge at all while the other secures the applicant's own professional fees in first position.

The second is that the restraint gets noticed on the record. Justice Myers did not merely grant Findev's order; he wrote down that the absence of priming charges made the approach a reasonable one. For a lender weighing whether to prime or to stand behind the mortgagees, that sentence is the only judicial commentary in these four files on the question — and it is available to be cited.

What the records do not show is any of these proceedings finishing. Green Impact's stay expires on July 31 and its Monitor is asking for three more months, because the process it ran covered one division and the transaction covers one subsidiary's shares, per Third Report of the Monitor, July 14, 2026, paras. 52, 54. Victoria Park's first stay runs only to July 24, a week after it was granted, per Initial Order, July 17, 2026. The lender that opens a CCAA still has to close one.