It can file, but the shutdown has to be addressed head-on. The regulation requires the foreign entity to be doing business, meaning the regular and systematic supply of goods or services, so the petition must show what is still running rather than pass over the closure in silence.
Doing business is a verb, not an address
The phrase does more work than it looks like it does. An entity that keeps an office, a bank account and a corporate registration but supplies nothing is not doing business in the sense the rule intends, and neither is one that exists only as an agent for the American side. A temporary interruption is not automatically fatal, but it has to be explained with the same care as any other adverse fact.
Hypothetical example: a blender near Saint-Joachim-de-Shefford takes its mill offline for a seven-month rebuild and keeps servicing contracts from finished stock, keeps its formulation staff on payroll, and keeps writing orders for delivery after start-up. That is a describable continuity, and it can be evidenced with invoices, employment records and signed forward orders. The version that fails is the one where operations stopped, staff were released, and the entity is being kept alive on paper so the transfer can proceed.
Timing helps. Filing before a planned shutdown, or after operations resume, avoids putting the weakest month of the year at the centre of the file.