How does a lender's security interest rank against unpaid wages owed by an insolvent corporation?

This is one of the more nuanced areas where provincial PPSA priority rules interact with federal insolvency law. A properly perfected secured lender generally has priority over ordinary unsecured creditors, but Canadian insolvency legislation provides a limited category of unpaid employee wage claims with some statutory priority protection in certain insolvency circumstances, which can affect how much a secured lender actually recovers even where its security interest is properly perfected.

This limited wage-related priority doesn't mean secured lenders lose their position generally — it's a specific, bounded protection for a defined category of claims, not a broad override of secured lending priority across the board. The exact scope and amount of that protection is set by federal insolvency law rather than the PPSA itself, and changes to it aren't something a provincial-law analysis can answer on its own. Because this intersection between secured lending priority and employee wage protection in an insolvency is genuinely technical and fact-specific, a lender or a corporation navigating an actual insolvency involving unpaid wages should get advice from someone experienced in insolvency law specifically, not rely on general PPSA priority assumptions.