In my January 8, 2013 post (“My Name is Cliff, Drop Over Some Time”), I criticized parliamentarians for passing most tax legislation without much, if anything, in the way of informed debate. As a consequence, there is a lot of…
The matter of fictions in our Tax Act was on my mind this week. Second Life has nothing on the Income Tax Act when it comes to creating a virtual reality. I’m thinking of the various tax rules that deem…
Once in a while I read a tax case and say to myself: “That’s not fair!” If I’m otherwise having a good day, I’ll stop and think about it for a minute before blowing my stack about another injustice imposed…
As I head into the New Year I’m disheartened by the sorry state of the tax legislative process in both the US and Canada. The pathetic response of the US legislators to the debt crisis in that country is profoundly…
Once upon a time, courts in Canada and the United Kingdom were adamant that there was no room for equitable principles when applying the tax rules. In a 1956 decision the Supreme Court of Canada cited an English case (with…
In a recent article in a golfing magazine that I read, a leading light in the golf instruction world started off an article with the observation “Golf is a hard game.” (Hank Haney, “Golf Digest,” January 2013.) If you’re a…
Like most full time tax lawyers, I spend some of my time counseling clients interested in aggressive tax planning schemes. These sorts of arrangements have a number of common characteristics. Usually they have been suggested to the client by a…
If, like me, you’re a fan of Canadian football you’ve seen a lot of a commercial by a Canadian hardware chain that uses the tag line “Doing it Right.” The idea behind the ad is that with the right tools…
Many of my legal colleagues choose not to practice income tax law. According to them, “real lawyers” don’t do tax – tax is something accountants do, not lawyers. I usually choose not to challenge them on this; it’s enough to…
Our obligation as taxpayers to file an accurate return of income has been described by one Tax Court judge as “a bedrock of the tax system.” When a return that accurately reports the taxpayer’s income and deductions has been assessed,…