Treaty Shopping and the New Multilateral Tax Agreement—Is it Business as Usual in Canada?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
On 1 January 2020 the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) Multilateral Convention (MLI) entered into effect for many of Canada’s tax treaties. New provisions introduced by the MLI, specifically the principal purpose test (PPT) and a new preamble, raised concerns that the bar to deny treaty benefits would be substantially lower than the bar previously set by Canada’s General Anti- Avoidance Rule (GAAR). This paper considers how the MLI will impact access to treaty benefits in Canada by applying the new MLI measures to treaty shopping cases previously challenged under the GAAR. The paper concludes that application of the PPT by Canadian courts will result in similar outcomes in these cases. In short, the MLI will arrive ‘with a whimper and not a bang’ in Canada. The MLI’s most significant impact on Canadian international tax law will be the patchwork quilt of tax avoidance regimes that will govern Canada’s tax treaties in the future.\nLa Convention multilatérale (IM) , née de l’Initiative de l’OCDE e vue de prévenir l’érosion de la base d’imposition et le transfert des bénéfices (BEPS) et lutter contre l’évasion fiscale internationale, est entrée en vigueur au Canada le 1er décembre 2019. L’IM entraînera des modifications à de nombreuses conventions fiscales du Canada, notamment l’ajout de nouvelles mesures pour contrer les stratégies d’évitement fiscal. Il est généralement admis que ces mesures abaisseront considérablement la barre pour éliminer les avantages des conventions fiscales qui avait été fixée par la règle générale anti-évitement (RGAE) du Canada, et remettront en question le statu quo selon lequel, à des fins fiscales, le « chalandage fiscal » n’est pas en soi « intrinsèquement correct ou incorrect ». Le présent article remet en question cette conclusion. Le principal changement qui sera apporté par l’IM aux 93 conventions fiscales du Canada consistera en une série de régimes d’évitement fiscal différents selon qu’il s’agit d’une convention couverte ou non et selon les mesures d’évitement fiscal spécifiques qu’elle adopte.
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 | 0.004 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.021 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 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".