Bibliographic record
Abstract
The General Anti-Avoidance Rule (the GAAR) was originally introduced in Canadian income tax law in 1988 with prospective effect. The GAAR was amended in May 2005 to broaden its scope (by bringing under its ambit the regulations, treaties, etc.) and to lessen the burden of persuasion faced by the Minister in the misuse or abuse demonstration. What is peculiar about this amendment is that it was explicitly stated to have retroactive effect to the date the GAAR was first in effect - September 12, 1988. This chapter discusses the retroactive nature of the amendment of the GAAR. It proceeds in three stages. First, it provides an account of the relevant law surrounding the effectiveness and applicability of retroactive legislation in Canada, outlining the general presumption against retroactive legislation and addressing how express terms can override this presumption in many (but not all) contexts. Particular attention is paid to how Canadian courts have approached the application of retroactive enactments to pending proceedings. Second, this background is used to evaluate the Supreme Court of Canada's handling of the amendment of the GAAR in its first GAAR judgment (Canada Trustco). Finally, the chapter closes with a discussion of the policy underlying retroactivity and the GAAR more generally, suggesting that so long as retroactive fiscal legislation is possible (as it is in Canada) it is somewhat curious that so much reliance is placed on the GAAR. Enacting retroactive specific anti-avoidance rules (perhaps with a penalty) is possible and, from a policy perspective, arguably more effective and desirable at curbing aggressive tax avoidance.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".