The appellant ("CTM") sold mortgage loans made by it to arm's length securitization trusts and serviced the sold mortgages including collecting and accounting for payments, and dealing with renewals and defaults. The consideration for a sale for the most part comprised a "Closing Payment" paid by the purchaser trust out of the proceeds of commercial paper issuances and "Deferred Amounts" representing most of the cash subsequently generated to the trust from the purchased mortgages net of all other outlays. CTM did not explicitly charge the trusts for the servicing, but recorded fees for such services in its financial statements. In finding that there was a single supply of a financial service by CTM, Bowman ACJ quoted extensively from O.A. Brown, including a statement therein that "'the fact that a separate charge is made for one constituent part of a compound supply does not alter the tax consequences'," and stated (at para. 20):
[For there to be a single supply] there must be an inextricable interdependency between the two elements so that they are integral parts of a composite whole that cannot, as a matter of commercial reality, be sensibly separated into separate supplies. … Here we have a sale of mortgages of which the servicing is not only an integral part but is requisite as a matter of commercial exigency. There is an intimate commercial relationship between CTM and the trusts in which CTM not only holds the registered title to the mortgages in trust for the trusts, but also performs the very services which are essential to the commercial viability of the trusts' investment. For someone other than CTM to service the mortgages would, as a practical matter, be commercially infeasible and would be inimical to the raison d'être of the transaction.