Abusive Tax Avoidance and Possible Revisions to Canada’s General Anti-Avoidance Rule

Event Description: 

Canada’s general anti-avoidance rule (GAAR) was enacted in 1988 in order to limit the scope of the traditional Duke of Westminster principle that taxpayers have a quasi-constitutional right to avoid tax, and to end what the Supreme Court of Canada decision in Stubart Investments Ltd. (1984) characterized as the “action and reaction endlessly produced by complex, specific tax measures aimed at sophisticated business practices, and the inevitable, professionally guided and equally specialized taxpayer reaction.”

Despite a substantial body of GAAR jurisprudence over the past three decades, it is not clear that the GAAR has achieved its original objectives. For this reason, the federal government announced in its 2020 Fall Economic Statement that it would consult on measures to improve tax fairness by strengthening the GAAR, and released a consultation paper in August 2022 considering various alternatives.

This presentation, based on Professor Duff’s submission to the GAAR consultation, discusses the role of a statutory GAAR in a legal system shaped by the Duke of Westminster principle, and considers potential amendments to improve the GAAR as an instrument to counteract abusive tax avoidance.

A light lunch will be available for those attending in-person. Please contact Michelle Burchill at burchill@allard.ubc.ca for the Zoom link if you'd like to participate remotely.
 

Speaker:

David G. Duff is Professor of Law and Director of the Tax LLM program at the Peter A. Allard School of Law at the University of British Columbia, where he teaches and writes in the areas of areas of tax law and policy, corporate and international taxation, environmental taxation and distributive justice. 

Prior to joining UBC Law in 2009, Professor Duff was a faculty member of the University of Toronto Faculty of Law. Before that, he was a tax associate at the Toronto office of Stikeman, Elliott. He was also employed as a researcher with the Ontario Fair Tax Commission from 1991 to 1993 and as a tax policy analyst with the Ontario Ministry of Finance from 1993 to 1994.

He is a member and former Governor of the Canadian Tax Foundation, a member of the International Fiscal Association and the governing council of the Canadian branch of the International Fiscal Association, and an International Research Fellow of the Oxford University Centre for Business Taxation, and has been a visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute for Public Finance and Tax, the Oxford University Centre for Business Taxation, and the law faculties at Auckland University, Hebrew University in Jerusalem, McGill University, the University of Ottawa, Oxford University, and the University of Sydney.