Quebec’s Court of Appeal has refused to disturb the Asbestos Corporation Limited claims regime. For American workers’ compensation practitioners, carriers, and self-insured employers, the September 10, 2026 bar date is now the only date that matters.
What Just Happened
On August 18, 2026, the Honorable Simon Ruel, A.C.J., of the Quebec Court of Appeal dismissed, with costs, an application for leave to appeal the Asbestos Claims Review and Adjudication Order entered against Asbestos Corporation Limited (ACL). The judgment, No. 200-09-700256-263, was filed the next day in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York as Exhibit A to the Foreign Representative’s Tenth Status Report in the ancillary chapter 15 case, In re Asbestos Corporation Limited, No. 25-10934 (Bankr. S.D.N.Y.), ECF No. 211.
The underlying order came out of the Superior Court of Quebec on June 19, 2026 (2026 QCCS 2291) in ACL’s proceeding under Canada’s Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act, R.S.C. 1985, c. C-36 (CCAA). It builds the machinery by which more than 108,000 asserted asbestos disease claims, a large share of them American, will be reviewed, valued, and paid. A group of United States plaintiffs’ firms, together with Charles M. Forman as trustee for National Service Industries Inc., sought leave to appeal it on July 9, 2026. Argument was heard August 13, 2026.
Leave was denied. The claims process stands. And the practical consequence for anyone with an American asbestos file is a calendar entry, not a doctrinal one.
The Court’s Reasoning, In Brief
Leave to appeal under section 13 of the CCAA is granted sparingly. An applicant must satisfy four cumulative criteria: significance to the practice, significance to the action, prima facie merit rather than frivolousness, and whether the appeal would unduly hinder the progress of the action. Justice Ruel found the applicants failed on the first and the last.
• No issue of significance to the practice. Claims review and adjudication orders issue routinely under section 11 of the CCAA. Their terms are discretionary and tied to the facts of each restructuring. The alleged errors were, in the court’s view, factual and case-specific.
• The vote objection was premature and theoretical. Applicants argued the process permits claims to be settled without a vote of the claimants. The supervising judge had already noted that each victim decides whether to accept the proposed settlement, and that the court must rule on any settlement before ACL’s insurers or other third parties are released. A court need not decide a hypothetical question.
• Delay would fall on the unrepresented majority. Remitting the matter for a fresh hearing after the counter-expert report would push the claims process back by months. At the time of the judgment under review, the applicants represented 248 victims out of more than 108,000. Many of the rest have waited more than twenty years for a settlement proposal.
• Standing. The applicant group had grown from seven firms to seventeen after the judgment issued. Under article 351 of the Quebec Code of Civil Procedure, the right to appeal belongs to a party to the first-instance judgment. Only three of the firms qualified. As to the rest, the application was improperly brought.
The court also pointed to the internal appeal mechanism inside the adjudication order itself, and to the twenty-five page proof of claim form that lets a claimant present every aspect of the claim.
Deference did the work here. The supervising judge’s familiarity with a long, procedurally complex file was treated as a reason not to disturb his exercise of discretion. That is a familiar principle in insolvency supervision. It is an unfamiliar one to lawyers used to litigating disease causation claim by claim.
Why This Reaches Workers’ Compensation
ACL is not the employer of the American claimants. It mined and sold chrysotile fiber out of Thetford Mines, Quebec, into the United States market for roughly three decades. In compensation practice it is the classic third-party defendant standing behind the occupational disease claim. That is precisely why a Canadian restructuring order now sits on the critical path of American compensation files.
1. The Section 40 lien has nothing to attach to if no claim is filed
Every state gives the compensation payor some form of subrogation or lien interest in the injured worker’s third-party recovery. In New Jersey it is Section 40, N.J.S.A. 34:15-40, which the Supreme Court has construed broadly to reach proceeds derived from the third-party claim. See Frazier v. New Jersey Manufacturers Insurance Co., 142 N.J. 590 (1995).
The lien is derivative. It attaches to a recovery. When ACL’s tort exposure is converted into a CCAA claim governed by a bar date, the recovery exists only if a proof of claim is filed. The Monitor’s notice is blunt: existing asbestos claims not received by the Claims Bar Date will be forever barred and extinguished. A carrier or self-insured employer that treats its lien as self-executing, and waits for plaintiff’s counsel to protect it, may find in October that there is no fund, no reimbursement, and no defendant left to sue.
The same problem confronts carriers in the states that permit the compensation payor to prosecute the third-party action in its own name. That direct right of action is itself a claim against ACL. It is subject to the same bar date.
2. Individualized disease proof gives way to a valuation matrix
Compensation practitioners value an asbestos claim the hard way: exposure history, latency, B-readings, pulmonary function studies, pathology, apportionment among carriers and dates of exposure. The ACL process substitutes a framework that assesses claims by disease type.
That framework is not yet fixed. On June 10, 2026, the supervising judge adjourned adoption of the assessment framework so the objecting firms could file a counter-expert report challenging the methodology of the Plancich report. The June 19 order was issued with the framework carved out, to be established after that hearing. The Court of Appeal treated that carve-out as a reason to deny leave.
Read that carefully. The appellate door just closed on the architecture of the process. The door on the numbers is still open, and the counter-expert fight is where the actual compensation values will be decided. That is the proceeding worth watching.
3. No claimant vote, and no Section 524(g) analog
An American asbestos reorganization channeling claims into a trust under 11 U.S.C. § 524(g) requires approval by at least seventy-five percent of the voting claimant class and appointment of a legal representative for future claimants. Canadian insolvency law contains no equivalent. The Court of Appeal did not need to reach the point, because it found the objection premature.
The result is that leverage in this process is individual rather than collective. A claimant may decline an offer. A claimant class cannot vote one down. For lawyers accustomed to negotiating asbestos resolutions through committee structures and futures representatives, that is a structural change, not a procedural one.
4. Latency does not respect a bar date
Mesothelioma latency commonly runs twenty to fifty years from first exposure. Compensation law has adapted to that reality: a New Jersey occupational disease claim generally does not accrue until the disease manifests and is causally connected to employment. See Bond v. Rose Ribbon & Carbon Manufacturing Co., 42 N.J. 308 (1964); Fiore v. Consolidated Freightways, 140 N.J. 452 (1995).
A CCAA bar date does not wait for manifestation. Workers exposed to ACL fiber who are not yet symptomatic, and who therefore have no compensable claim under state law today, face extinguishment of the third-party remedy that would fund tomorrow’s lien. Counsel should be identifying exposed but undiagnosed clients now, not at diagnosis.
5. Dependency and death claims are separately at risk
Dependency benefits under provisions such as N.J.S.A. 34:15-13 belong to the surviving spouse and dependents, not to the decedent’s estate. Their wrongful death and survival claims against ACL are independent claims that must be independently filed. Estates closed years ago, and families who never retained tort counsel because the compensation claim resolved cleanly, are the population most likely to miss this bar date entirely.
6. Medicare Secondary Payer obligations do not travel to Quebec
A payment out of the ACL claims process to an American claimant is a liability settlement. Section 111 reporting and conditional payment recovery under 42 U.S.C. § 1395y(b) follow the settlement, not the forum. A Quebec claims administrator has no obligation under Canadian law to resolve a CMS conditional payment demand or to consider future medical exposure. The claimant and claimant’s counsel carry that risk alone, and a matrix-derived payment that ignores it can leave a client worse off than before.
The Hearing That Actually Binds Americans
The Quebec judgment does not, by itself, bind a claimant in Ohio or South Carolina. The Chapter 15 case does. On August 24, 2026, at 9:00 a.m. Eastern, the Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York is scheduled to hear the Foreign Representative’s motion for an order recognizing and enforcing the Bar Date Orders and the Claims Adjudication Orders. The case is No. 25-10934, before Judge Lisa G. Beckerman.
Chief Judge Martin Glenn recognized the CCAA proceeding as a foreign main proceeding on October 29, 2025, and extended the automatic stay. The pending motion is the next step: converting the Canadian claims regime into an order enforceable against American claimants and lienholders.
The remaining leverage sits in the Chapter 15 statute itself, and it is real:
• 11 U.S.C. § 1522(a) conditions discretionary relief on sufficient protection of the interests of creditors and other interested entities. The Fourth Circuit read that provision as requiring a genuine balancing, and affirmed conditions imposed to protect American parties, in Jaffe v. Samsung Electronics Co., 737 F.3d 14 (4th Cir. 2013), affirming In re Qimonda AG, 462 B.R. 165 (Bankr. E.D. Va. 2011).
• 11 U.S.C. § 1506 withholds relief that would be manifestly contrary to United States public policy.
• Comity is not automatic. The Fifth Circuit declined to enforce a foreign plan that extinguished non-debtor obligations in In re Vitro S.A.B. de C.V., 701 F.3d 1031 (5th Cir. 2012).
Those are the provisions through which the absence of a claimant vote, the absence of a futures representative, and the substitution of a matrix for individualized proof can still be tested. They are also, for practical purposes, the last provisions available.
Practice Points
1. Audit the file inventory against ACL. Identify every open and recently closed asbestos occupational disease file involving Thetford Mines chrysotile or ACL-supplied fiber. Product identification records, union exposure histories, and prior third-party pleadings are the fastest screen.
2. Calendar September 10, 2026 as a hard date. Proofs of claim must be received by the Monitor by that date. Treat it as a statute of repose, not a deadline that will be extended.
3. File to protect the lien, not just the claim. Compensation carriers and self-insured employers should confirm in writing that a proof of claim has been filed for each worker on whose behalf they hold a subrogation interest, and should evaluate filing in their own right where state law allows it.
4. Do not overlook dependents. Surviving spouses and dependents hold separate claims. Reopen closed death files long enough to determine whether anyone filed.
5. Screen the exposed but undiagnosed. Latency will not toll the bar date. Advise clients with documented exposure and no current diagnosis about the consequences of not filing.
6. Track the assessment framework hearing. The challenge to the Plancich report will set the compensation values. That is the fight with money in it.
7. Preserve Medicare and lien positions. Assume no foreign administrator will resolve conditional payments or future medical exposure for you.
8. Monitor the August 24 hearing. Whether the Southern District of New York enforces the bar date and adjudication orders determines whether any of this is optional for American claimants.
The Larger Point
There is a defensible case for what Quebec has built. More than 108,000 people have waited decades while a shrinking pool of insurance was spent on litigating a handful of cases to judgment. A consolidated, funded, scheduled claims process delivers something to many people who would otherwise receive nothing. Justice Ruel’s emphasis on the 248 represented victims against the 108,000 unrepresented ones was not rhetorical.
But American workers’ compensation law was built on the opposite premise: that an occupational disease claim is proved individually, on medical evidence, against an employer or a product supplier who must meet that evidence. This restructuring replaces that premise with an actuarial one, and it does so in a forum where the safeguards Congress wrote into Section 524(g) simply do not exist.
Whatever one concludes about the merits, the operational lesson is not in dispute. For the American compensation bar, the appellate phase of this case is over and the administrative phase has begun. The clock is running, and it stops on September 10.
Sources
1. Arrangement relating to Asbestos Corporation Limited, Judgment on Application for Leave to Appeal, No. 200-09-700256-263 (Que. C.A. Aug. 18, 2026) (Ruel, A.C.J.) (certified English translation), filed as Exhibit A to ECF No. 211-1, In re Asbestos Corporation Limited, No. 25-10934 (Bankr. S.D.N.Y. Aug. 19, 2026).
2. Foreign Representative’s Tenth Status Report, In re Asbestos Corporation Limited, No. 25-10934 (Bankr. S.D.N.Y. Aug. 19, 2026), ECF No. 211.
3. Arrangement relating to Asbestos Corporation Limited, 2026 QCCS 2291 (Que. Sup. Ct. June 19, 2026) (Asbestos Claims Review and Adjudication Order); see also 2026 QCCS 2279 and 2026 QCCS 7, Schedule E (proof of claim form).
4. Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act, R.S.C. 1985, c. C-36, ss. 11, 13 (Can.).
5. Raymond Chabot Inc., Monitor, ACL public record file, https://www.raymondchabot.com/en/business/public-records/asbestos-corporation/
6. ACL Claims portal (Monitor), claims bar date of September 10, 2026, https://asbestoscorp.rcgt.com/; submission instructions at https://asbestoscorp.rcgt.com/registration
7. Kroll Restructuring Administration, Asbestos Corporation Limited, Case No. 25-10934, case information and hearing calendar (August 24, 2026 hearing on motion enforcing bar date and claim adjudication orders), https://cases.ra.kroll.com/asbestoscorporation/
8. Memorandum Opinion Granting Motion for Recognition of Foreign Main Proceeding, In re Asbestos Corporation Limited, No. 25-10934 (Bankr. S.D.N.Y. Oct. 29, 2025) (Glenn, C.J.), https://www.nysb.uscourts.gov/sites/default/files/opinions/329146_141_opinion.pdf
9. Docket and opinions, In re Asbestos Corporation Limited, No. 1:25-bk-10934 (Bankr. S.D.N.Y.), https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/USCOURTS-nysb-1_25-bk-10934/USCOURTS-nysb-1_25-bk-10934-0
10. Kroll Restructuring Administration LLC and Raymond Chabot Inc., notice to persons with asbestos-related claims (Apr. 13, 2026), PR Newswire, https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/if-you-or-someone-you-know-exposed-to-products-containing-asbestos-your-rights-may-be-affected-by-the-asbestos-corporation-limited-insolvency-proceedings-803501238.html
11. Jaffe v. Samsung Electronics Co., 737 F.3d 14 (4th Cir. 2013). Full text also at Justia.
12. In re Qimonda AG, 462 B.R. 165 (Bankr. E.D. Va. 2011).
13. In re Vitro S.A.B. de C.V., 701 F.3d 1031 (5th Cir. 2012).
14. Frazier v. New Jersey Manufacturers Insurance Co., 142 N.J. 590 (1995). Full text also at Justia.
15. Bond v. Rose Ribbon & Carbon Manufacturing Co., 42 N.J. 308 (1964).
16. Fiore v. Consolidated Freightways, 140 N.J. 452 (1995).
17. 11 U.S.C. §§ 524(g), 1506, 1520, 1521, 1522; 42 U.S.C. § 1395y(b); N.J.S.A. 34:15-13, 34:15-31, 34:15-40.
18. Jon L. Gelman, Canadian Asbestos Giant Forces Dying Americans Into Foreign Courts, Workers’ Compensation (Dec. 30, 2025).
Recommended Citation
Gelman, Jon L., Asbestos Claims Clock Runs Out, Workers’ Compensation, workers-compensation.blogspot.com (Aug. 20, 2026), https://workers-compensation.blogspot.com/2026/08/asbestos-claims-clock-runs-out.html
About the Author
Jon L. Gelman of Wayne, NJ, is the author of NJ Workers’ Compensation Law (West-Thomson-Reuters) and co-author of the national treatise Modern Workers’ Compensation Law (West-Thomson-Reuters).
Blog: Workers’ Compensation
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© 2026 Jon L Gelman. All rights reserved.
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