It's time to stem the tide of successful people leaving Canada
There are many successful Canadians who are exploring or outright leaving this country. Reliable statistics are hard to come by, but tax practitioners such as myself have been kept very busy because economic and taxation policies matter, especially the messaging surrounding such policies.
In the first 23 years of my career, I worked on approximately a dozen “departure tax” cases. Departure tax is the lingo that is used in my profession since a deemed disposition of one’s assets will immediately occur before a person becomes a non-resident of Canada, thus causing taxation (there are a variety of exceptions to this general rule). But the number of files that my colleagues and I have worked on in the past nine years has skyrocketed into the hundreds.
It started with one of the new Liberal government’s first announcements in November 2015 that it would be “asking the wealthy to pay just a little bit more” by introducing a new top-end personal tax bracket that increased the previous highest rate by four percentage points. This measure boosted many provinces’ maximum combined federal-provincial personal tax rates to approximately 54 per cent.
To be fair, not all the new files we worked on resulted in people leaving Canada, but many people ultimately did and the rest wanted to know their options. Suffice it to say that the wealth associated with such files is massive.
The determination of whether or not a person is or becomes a non-resident of Canada for tax purposes is very much a question that requires careful analysis. Intention is not all that determinative. In other words, you might have the intention of being a non-resident of Canada for tax purposes, but your facts better make it so. Accordingly, it takes careful
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