For the purposes of section 160 of the Income Tax Act, it does not matter whether the transferor or transferee knows that the transferor owes tax at the time of the transfer. What they intend to accomplish by making the transfer is irrelevant as well. In both cases, section 160 will apply, if its other conditions are satisfied. But what about the case where the transferor purports to transfer property to the transferee without her knowledge or consent. In Leclair v Canada, 2011 TCC 323 the court held that section 160 did not apply in those circumstances.
Measuring Employment Benefits
If you teach at a private school, and the school offers your children discounted tuition as part of your compensation package, what is the value of the benefit that must be included in your income for the purposes of the…
Gifts and Family Law
When the patriarch or matriarch of a family decides to implement a freeze it is quite common for him or her to insist that the gift of the growth shares be excluded from net family property for the purposes of the Family Law Act (Ontario). Are such exclusions effective? McNamee v McNamee, 2011 ONCA 533, illustrates well why lawyers must emphasize to clients that the answer is still a definite “maybe”.
Non-share Corporations for Cottages?
Some practitioners have suggested that it might be possible to use a non-share corporation to own a family cottage. Query, however, whether the CRA would assess a benefit to a member of a corporation who used its cottage and didn’t…
CanLII
CanLII is a resource that I’ve watched grow with a great deal of interest. I use it almost every day for one reason or another, not least as a reference for posts to this blog. I just noticed some handy…
Buckingham
For those of us who defend director liability cases, R v Buckingham, 2011 FCA 142, is a must-read.
T1 Short
A friend of mine was going through his father’s papers and found some old tax returns. He passed one along to me—a 1948 T1 Short—with his permission to post it here, which I am doing with names and addresses redacted.…
Nullity
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: the procedural rules for tax disputes are strict: they do not leave room for what is “fair”. In Hess v. R, 2011 TCC 387, the taxpayer, it might have been argued, filed an objection to a notice of assessment issued in 2003. The CRA, however, reassessed the taxpayer for the same year in 2006, and the taxpayer took no action in respect of the subsequent reassessment until 2009. Justice Woods responded to the fairness argument as follows:
Crazy
The judgment in Chaput v R, 2011 TCC 363, is short and to the point. I reproduce it here in its entirety:
Kiddie tax
In Jeannotte v R, 2011 TCC 247, the taxpayer’s representative tried to argue that the Court should make an exception to the kiddie tax rules on income from a trust that was set up, not to avoid tax, but to…