As a follow up to our previous report on Canada’s Budget 2025 (the “Budget”), certain indirect tax measures proposed in the Budget are now being considered by Parliament, as the Budget 2025 Implementation Act, No. 2 (“Bill C-31”) received its second reading on June 3, 2026, and is currently at the House of Commons Standing Committee on Finance for consideration.
As we previously blogged on here, British Columbia (“BC”) recently announced a further expansion of its Provincial Sales Tax (“PST”) base to certain goods and services including new professional services like accounting, architectural, and real estate services.
Most Canadian businesses assume that once an employee or professional advisor has been authorized to deal with the Canada Revenue Agency (“CRA”), that individual has the immediate ability to access and update all of the business’s online CRA information. As the CRA recently confirmed at an industry roundtable, that assumption is incorrect, with different authorization levels permitting different activities and access to one CRA Account not necessarily providing access to others.
The Canada Revenue Agency (“CRA”) has recently announced an important administrative change affecting many large business audits (“Audits”). More specifically, CRA has advised at a major industry roundtable that rather than examining one taxation year at a time, Auditors may now adopt a two-year Audit workplan and request records from multiple years at the outset of an Audit.
Quarterly GST/HST installments are a persistent administrative headache for many business owners. However, a recent Tax Court of Canada (“TCC”) decision proves there are no easy shortcuts around these recurring compliance duties.
BUDGET 2025 HARD TO CELEBRATE BUT PROPOSES SOME GOOD INDIRECT TAX CHANGES
Canada's Budget 2025 was launched on November 4th with the energy of a lead balloon. Despite the doom and gloom focus on the continuing deficit financing by the Liberal Government – off-loading our current woes on the backs of our children and grandchildren – there were some (largely) positive changes from an Indirect Tax perspective.
PREMIER FORD ANNOUNCES EXPORT TAX, BUT WILL IT BE LEGAL?
On March 4, 2025, Ontario’s Premier Doug Ford announced further a retaliatory measure to the recently announced Trump tariffs, indicating that Ontario would apply a tax on exports of electricity to the United States (“US”). While that announcement might make many Ontarians (and Canadians) feel good about "taking a stance", one wonders whether Ontario has the legal powers to do what it says it is going to do.
