Tax & Trade Blog

As we wrote here, Canada’s rules taxing Vaping Products were first enacted in 2018, with the Tobacco and Vaping Products Act (“TVPA”), continue to involve, with a number of provinces and territories now getting into the taxing game.  While the TVPA sets out a regulatory framework for manufacturers, importers, retailers and any other business involved in the vaping industry, the provincial rules center largely on ensuring their allocation of the taxes from this new found source of tax income!

The Canada Revenue Agency (“CRA”) has recently released some new Guidance on how all of these taxes are supposed to work together, but the policy goal of this (i.e., taxing something that in many eyes is meant to be an alternative to an incredibly-bad-for-your-health smoking habit) remains suspect.

Businesses engaged exclusively in commercial activities get full input tax credits (“ITCs”) enabling them to recover all the GST/HST they pay in the course of their business activities.  Organizations engaged exclusively in “exempt” activities (financial services, healthcare, educational-related institutions) get no ITCs, meaning that GST/HST is a hard cost in their business. 

In between the two are businesses that carry on BOTH commercial and exempt activities, and in order to determine the ITCs these businesses are eligible to claim, a “fair and reasonable” allocation method has to be used.  A recent decision of the Tax Court of Canada (the “TCC”) in Marine Atlantic Inc. v. The King (2023 TCC 95) explores what that really means.

As announced in the Liberal-NDO Coalition Government’s 2024 Budget, and at a time when the government seems hard-pressed to increase taxation in Canada to deal with the massive spending over the last few years, the Canada Revenue Agency (“CRA”) has been given some brand new tax Audit powers – which to some respects are downright frightening.

As we initially described here, the Canada Revenue Agency (“CRA”) continues auditing and assessing individual home-owners who have either substantially re-built their homes or commissioned the construction of a new home for their own use on the resale value of those homes in a number of alarming instances.