Sears Holdings sold Sears Canada's best assets and starved the rest — 12,000 jobs lost

Sears Canada was a fixture of Canadian retail for 65 years, at one point the country's largest department-store chain. By the 2010s it was owned by Sears Holdings, the US parent controlled by Eddie Lampert, which treated the Canadian unit less as a business to grow than as a source of cash to prop up the struggling American chain.

Over a decade the parent sold off Sears Canada's most valuable assets and sent the proceeds south. Its stake in the flagship Toronto Eaton Centre lease and four other prime stores was sold in 2013 for about C$400 million, and its credit-card portfolio went to JPMorgan in 2014 for about C$288 million. Almost nothing was reinvested in the stores, even as rivals and online shopping pulled customers away and sales fell year after year.

In June 2017 Sears Canada filed for creditor protection under Canada's CCAA restructuring law, closing 59 stores and cutting 2,900 jobs in a first round, hoping to shrink to a viable core and find a buyer. No buyer came. On October 10, 2017 it asked the Ontario Superior Court for approval to liquidate everything; the court agreed on October 13. The last of the remaining stores closed on January 14, 2018, eliminating nearly 12,000 jobs and leaving the pension plan about C$270 million short.