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Hudson’s Bay Co. has proposed to start liquidating at all but six of its 96 stores starting Monday, as their lawyers returned to court on Friday morning in search of an order that could seal the fate of Canada’s oldest department store.

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The stores the company doesn’t plan to liquidate as of now are located at its flagship store in downtown Toronto, Yorkdale Shopping Centre in Toronto, Hillcrest Mall in Richmond Hill, Ont., and three stores in the Greater Montreal Area: Carrefour Laval mall, Pointe-Claire mall and the downtown location.

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The company is in discussions with landlords of those stores to see if there’s an opportunity to restructure, HBC’s lawyers said.

“We were able to negotiate for their removal, at least on a temporary basis,” Ashley Taylor, a lawyer at Stikeman Elliott LLP representing HBC, told the court. “The applicants are in discussions with the landlords about whether there may be some opportunity to restructure around those stores. However, the time to do so remains very short.”

He also said he wants “to be crystal clear” that HBC does not currently have an agreement on which it could base a restructuring plan.

HBC’s lawyers said that sales have exceeded expectations following the news of the company’s potential closure. As such, the company won’t require a loan it had taken to conduct the liquidation sale, its lease monetization process and other aspects.

The company has also agreed to pay about $7 million per month to its joint-venture partner RioCan Real Estate Investment Trust, one of Canada’s largest REITs, which co-owns several HBC stores.

HBC had previously asked an Ontario court to temporarily exempt it from making payments linked to the joint venture as it tries to regain financial stability, but RioCan opposed that motion and said it was disappointed by how Hudson’s Bay was looking to restructure itself.

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Judge Peter Osborne, who has been hearing the motions at the Ontario Superior Court of Justice in Toronto since March 7, has been giving time to the parties involved to engage, discuss and make progress on their before providing a final order.

The closure of HBC’s stores could impact its 9,360 employees and could “drastically” alter the dynamics of malls nationally by removing a “major anchor and driver of customer traffic,” the company said in a statement last week.

As such, the company is speaking to key stakeholders, such as landlords, to create an alternative path that could preserve jobs and tenancy in retail locations. But this would also require a significant amount of capital, which the company has failed to obtain in the recent past.

“Our team has worked incredibly hard to identify a viable path forward,” HBC chief executive Liz Rodbell said in a statement last week, adding the company “would pursue every possible opportunity to secure the necessary support from key landlords and other stakeholders to save the Bay.”

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