Toronto Star – Laid off Sears Canada workers include Mike Myers’ brother

It took less than one minute for nearly half of Sears Canada’s head office employees in Toronto to be let go before they were shown the door at a meeting at the downtown Metro Convention Centre on June 22.

Peter Myers, 59, a senior director of planning at Sears Canada, was sitting in the front row. In 2014, Myers starred in an amusing commercial with his brother, comedian Mike Myers, that has logged more than 1.8 million views on YouTube in English and in French.

Three years later, Peter was in a conference room with colleagues being told by a Sears official that they were being laid off because Sears was restructuring.

That same morning in a downtown courthouse, Sears Canada obtained temporary protection from creditors under the Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act (CCAA), allowing them to close 59 stores and let go 2,900 employees without paying severance, in an effort to keep part of the chain in business.

All told that morning, 500 of the 1,185 people who worked at Sears Canada’s head office in Toronto were let go.

In a business insolvency, employees generally have to line up behind secured creditors for severance that they would ordinarily be entitled to. Someone like Myers, who would have celebrated 36 years at the company in August, would have been eligible for about two years of payments, according to Jon Pinkus, a Toronto labour lawyer Jon Pinkus of Samfiru Tumarkin LLP.

“Arguably we have it wrong right now. Arguably we have an equation where the most vulnerable people are those that are protected the least,” said Pinkus.

He said Sears Canada abruptly broke off discussions with the firm’s lawyers, who had been negotiating severance settlements on behalf of employees who had been let go before the CCAA application.

Read the full article in the Toronto Star here.

Learn more about the Sears Canada bankruptcy and how the Sears Act works.