Bankruptcy and proposal filings are the clearest public signal of distress in the Canadian small-business economy — and the Office of the Superintendent of Bankruptcy reports them by sector every quarter.
Headline figure
1,281
Total business insolvencies filed across Canada in the second quarter of 2026 (April–June), reported by the Office of the Superintendent of Bankruptcy (OSB), split 920 bankruptcies and 361 proposals — up 0.2% from the 1,278 filed in the same quarter of 2025.
What the data says
The Office of the Superintendent of Bankruptcy is the federal regulator created under the Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act, and it is the only body that publishes a national, quarterly, sector-tagged count of business insolvency filings. "Business" here means an incorporated or unincorporated commercial debtor filing a bankruptcy or a proposal under the BIA — it does not include informal wind-downs, dissolutions with no creditor process, or CCAA restructurings, which the OSB tracks on a separate schedule.
A single quarterly total tells you almost nothing about a specific deal. The sector breakdown does: a sponsor underwriting a construction or hospitality roll-up is buying into the two sectors carrying the heaviest insolvency load this quarter, which is useful context for pricing downside risk and for reading a target's own supplier and subcontractor insolvency exposure during diligence.
| Sector | Filings |
|---|---|
| Construction | 214 |
| Accommodation and food services | 191 |
| Transportation and warehousing | 136 |
| Manufacturing | 112 |
| Professional, scientific and technical services | 86 |
Source: Office of the Superintendent of Bankruptcy, Insolvency Statistics in Canada — Q2 2026, released 10 August 2026. The five sectors shown carried the largest filing counts; the OSB's full release covers every NAICS sector.
An insolvency count tells you a business failed to meet its obligations. It says nothing about which of two very different legal paths that failure will take. Under the Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act, s. 244(1)–(2), a secured creditor enforcing against “all or substantially all” of an insolvent debtor’s inventory, receivables or other property must send a ten-day notice of intention before it can enforce — a hard floor on how fast a receivership can move, regardless of how urgently a buyer wants to close. A restructuring under the Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act, s. 36 runs a different clock entirely: the court weighs process reasonableness, monitor approval, and whether the price is “reasonable and fair, taking into account…market value” before authorizing a sale outside the ordinary course of business, and a sale to a related party additionally requires “good faith efforts…to sell to persons who are not related” under s. 36(4)–(5). Neither clock appears in the OSB’s quarterly count; both determine how quickly a distressed target in that count actually becomes buyable.
A distressed target is not automatically a CCAA sale, and the two paths lead to very different diligence checklists. For the court-supervised route see where the buyable stock of small and mid-sized firms actually sits, and for what a distressed-adjacent sale actually looks like once ownership changes hands, see how many Canadian businesses change hands each year.
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