The Alberta government and an unlikely crew of allies — including Greenpeace, an oil lobbying firm, Ecojustice and attorneys general of four different provinces — are squaring off with ATB Financial in a Supreme Court case that could let polluters off the hook when they go bankrupt.
The question being tried is whether creditors, like banks, can pick and choose the best assets an oil company owns when it goes bust, or whether governments can use a company’s good assets to pay to clean up its messes before the banks get paid.