Canwest puts papers up for sale

Canwest Global Communications Corp. announced it is seeking buyers for its newspaper publishing unit at the same time as it requested creditor protection for the division.

In a Toronto courtroom on Friday, the Canwest Limited Partnership, which holds all of Canwest's newspaper and online operations, filed for creditor protection under the Companies' Creditors Arrangement Act.

The Winnipeg-based company's main television assets were put under court protection in October, but thus far, the publishing assets have operated outside that process.

Along with the creditor protection filing, a group of the media conglomerate's lenders have agreed to bid for the unit's assets, a so-called "stalking horse" bid that is aimed at setting a floor price.

National Post excluded

The lenders have also pledged to put up $25 million to carry the affected business units through the restructuring process. The National Post was a part of the Canwest LP unit but is not part of the CCAA filing, the company said Friday.

The entire proposal still requires the approval of a majority of the company's creditors. The company has hired RBC Capital Markets "to canvass the market for superior offers for the business," a Canwest press release said.

"We have almost half of the secured lenders that are not only supporting a consensual financial restructuring, but that same group ... is also prepared to put an offering in to purchase the full integrated publishing group," Canwest spokesman John Douglas said.

Should the lenders take over the new company, "substantially all" of Canwest LP's employees would come with it, and the company would assume all obligations related to pensions and benefits, said a statement from McMillan LLP, one of the law firms involved in the restructuring.

"What it means is that by the spring, we expect that both the publishing group as well as the broadcast group will be able to emerge from creditor protection with significantly less debt and a lot more stability and able to capitalize on the Canadian economy as it begins to improve," Douglas said.

Indeed, the filing is not necessarily a threat to the company's many newspapers across the country, experts say.

"I don't think it means anything shuts down immediately," Ross Howard, a journalism instructor at Langara College in B.C., told CBC News. 

"Most of their newspapers across the country have been operating close to profitable … so I don't think it means we lose the Vancouver Sun or the Province or the Courier or any of the weeklies in the immediate future."

Canwest LP owns and operates a host of daily and community newspapers across the country, including the Victoria Times Colonist, the Vancouver Sun, the Vancouver Province, the Edmonton Journal, the Calgary Herald, the Saskatoon StarPhoenix, the Regina Leader-Post, the Windsor Star, the Ottawa Citizen and The Gazette in Montreal.