Articles 2024

Topics discussed at the February meeting included disclaimer provisions in mutual wills, tax treatment of attorney compensation, thorny issues facing the calculation of estate administration tax, and estate trustee liability in the face of an insufficient holdback, among others.

Please find below our summaries of this past week’s civil decisions of the Court of Appeal for Ontario. In Carleton Condominium Corporation No. 476 v. Wong, the Court issued its first decision regarding COVID-19. The appellant requested an adjournment of an appeal because in-person hearings are suspended. Paciocco J. denied the request, holding that the inevitable backlog of appeals should not be aggravated by adjourning matters that can be fairly adjudicated in writing.

On April 1, the Privacy and Access to Information Law Section hosted a webinar to discuss exceptions to the consent requirements for handling personal information and personal health information in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

If you’re like me, then you will agree that COVID-19 has not provided us with more time to read for leisure or reorganize the pantry. If you have a young one at home, you are likely balancing the stress of this pandemic, the pressure of your billable target, crisis managing your clients, all with your new full-time job—care-giving.

This is the second installment of the OBA Tax Section's Q&A series with women lawyers in tax. The objective of this series is to give insight into the tax law career possibilities and practice areas that women can have, to give advice to junior tax lawyers or students who may be considering tax, and to shine the spotlight on women leaders in the tax profession. In this quarter, we feature Laura White, a retired partner from Borden Ladner Gervais LLP.

Both the TCC and the FCA agreed with the basic proposition that a duly executed settlement agreement between the CRA and a taxpayer must be adhered to by the parties. The CRA was unable to resile from their settlement.

The lag between a subcontractor completing its work on a project and the subcontractor being paid has been a longstanding source of tension in the construction industry. In the past, subcontractors typically had to wait for the contractor to be paid by the owner before money would flow down to them and, even then, there was no guarantee that they would be paid within weeks or even months of completing work on a project.

This article considers three key issues at the intersection of construction and insolvency law: (1) the “stay of proceedings;” (2) the operation of the Construction Act trust provisions in an insolvency context; and (3) the treatment of suppliers critical to the restructuring of a construction business.