Tax

  • September 25, 2026

    Co-founder terminations: The importance of good paper signed on incorporation

    Barry Anthony Cullain owned one-third of an Ontario elevator maintenance business and was its vice-president of operations. The other two shareholders each held a third. While an acquisition financing was closing, they proposed to buy his shares. The financing failed. They took him off the payroll and said he had retired.

  • September 25, 2026

    Supreme Court’s Côté J. an impactful ‘out of the box’ thinker: law professor

    Supreme Court of Canada Justice Suzanne Côté has significantly impacted the top court’s jurisprudence and culture since her appointment almost 12 years ago, says University of Alberta constitutional law professor Gerard Kennedy.

  • September 25, 2026

    Exclusive: Supreme Court of Canada Justice Suzanne Côté mulls her post-bench future

    Supreme Court of Canada Justice Suzanne Côté is thinking about what life after the bench might look like, she tells Law360 Canada. The court’s impactful and most prolific judge, who turned 68 this week with no apparent loss of drive or energy, says she is healthy and still loves the work that has earned her a reputation as a trailblazer and original thinker.

  • September 24, 2026

    PBO projects $4.5B in revenue from NDP-proposed high-income tax brackets

    A proposal to introduce three new federal income tax brackets for high earners would generate an additional $4.5 billion in net federal revenue over the 2026-27 to 2030-31 period, according to an estimate released by the Parliamentary Budget Office on Sept. 22.

  • September 24, 2026

    On appeal, tax courts look for material errors, not just procedural fairness: Lessons from Siam v. Canada

    Part one of this series examined how the Federal Court of Appeal in Siam v. Canada, 2026 FCA 91 applied the Mpamugo v. The Queen, 2016 TCC 215 framework to a taxpayer’s claim that the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) never sent his original Notice of Assessment.

  • September 24, 2026

    The principle of equal theft

    I used to advise clients who were involved in shareholder disputes. I would always ask whether the shareholders had been less than angelic in their dealings with each other and the tax department. Although businesspeople tend not to judge people who only steal from the tax department to be all that bad, for the sake of simplicity I will refer to both shareholders who steal from each other, and shareholders who steal from the tax department, as crooks.

  • September 23, 2026

    Burden initially on taxpayer to prove CRA never sent Notice of Assessment: Lessons from Siam v. Canada

    This is part one of a two-part series examining Siam v. Canada, 2026 FCA 91, in which the Federal Court of Appeal addressed a recurring evidentiary problem in tax reassessment litigation: what a taxpayer must actually prove when arguing that the Canada Revenue Agency never sent an original Notice of Assessment.

  • September 23, 2026

    The meaning of ‘effective’: Canada’s new AML compliance-program standard

    Since March 26, 2026, every reporting entity under the Proceeds of Crime (Money Laundering) and Terrorist Financing Act must under the new s. 9.6(1.1) “ensure that the program is reasonably designed, risk-based and effective.” Its schedule entry is a very serious violation with a $20 million per violation ceiling for an entity ($4 million for a person). Little has been written about what s. 9.6(1.1) actually adds: an express program-level performance standard.

  • September 22, 2026

    P.E.I. to dismantle IRAC, replace it with ‘specialized bodies’

    Prince Edward Island will move to dismantle a 35-year-old quasi-judicial tribunal and replace it with two new decision-making bodies that will continue to deal with various appeals and disputes.

  • September 22, 2026

    Earnouts: Where sellers should spend their negotiating capital

    In mergers and acquisitions (M&A) transactions, there is a constant struggle between the vendor and purchaser regarding risk allocation. This tension often arises from uncertainty regarding future performance, issues identified during due diligence and disagreements regarding value. One common mechanism for bridging that gap is an earnout, which makes part of the purchase price contingent on the post-closing performance of the target business.