The Hudson’s Bay landlords who fought Ruby Liu just won $2.4 million—sort of
The Bay’s old landlords can recover their legal costs, if the company has any cash left
An Ontario judge has ruled in favour of Hudson’s Bay’s former landlords, who demanded $2.4 million to cover their legal costs after a long fight over the defunct department store’s leases.
The Bay’s parent company, HBC, went into creditor protection last spring, kicking off a fire sale of the venerable store’s assets. Those included its leases in malls across the country, many of which had terms stretching into the 2090s. In May 2025, HBC found a buyer for 25 of them: Ruby Liu, a Chinese Canadian mall owner, who agreed to buy them all for $69.1 million.
Related: The Bay’s landlords are suing HBC over their multimillion-dollar legal battle with Ruby Liu
The landlords on the other side of those leases, however, were some of the largest property barons in Canada, including Cadillac Fairview, Oxford Properties and Ivanhoé Cambridge. Those big players didn’t want Liu as a tenant: her business plans appeared incomplete and, besides, they had better uses for those big boxes.
So began a court battle that raged all summer long, and only concluded in October 2025, when a judge ruled against HBC and Liu, and handed the leases back to their respective landlords. The whole boondoggle involved scores of hearings, affidavits and correspondences—in other words, expensive lawyer work—and the landlords approached the court asking for $2.4 million in compensation for their legal fees.
Related: The Battle for the Bay: How the country’s oldest corporation came to its bitter end
That’s what the judge gave a thumbs-up for this month, but the landlords may never see the money. HBC remains in creditor protection, meaning its creditors are haggling to get whatever money they can out of the defunct company. Whether the landlords should take priority over other creditors is, in the words of Judge Jessica Kimmel, “a matter for another day.”
Even if they never see a cent, however, the landlords will have succeeded in setting a precedent. It’s rare for judges to award costs in creditor protection cases, and Kimmel wrote in her decision she did so to encourage future parties to be “thoughtful about litigation strategies” and pursue settlement instead.
In other words, let’s try avoiding a mess like this again.
Anthony Milton is a freelance journalist based in Toronto specializing in long-form magazine writing. He previously worked as an assistant editor at Toronto Life, where he launched the Front Row newsletter. He regularly contributes all sorts of stories to the magazine, including deep dives on sports, business and housing as well as short-form commentary on our ever-changing city, from its obsession with cherry blossoms to its maddening NIMBYism. His work has also appeared in Maclean’s, Ricochet, TVO, the Trillium and more.
