Under the former s. 55(1) of the Act, the taxpayer might have been found to have artificially or unduly created a loss from the disposition of shares, so that the loss would have been denied. Subsection 55(1) had been repealed when the disposition occurred, but there was a transitional provision (s. 33(4) of the amending Act) which provided that s. 55(1) would still apply for a limited time to a "series of transactions" commencing before the repeal. In finding that it was appropriate for this phrase to be given its ordinary restricted meaning, Evans JA stated (at para 47):
[A] statutory provision does not normally apply to events after its repeal. ... To continue to apply subsection 55(1) to a post-repeal disposition that was part of a series of sequential but not pre-ordained transactions [(and hence not conforming to the ordinary jurisprudential definition that a "series of transactions" be pre-ordained)] would unduly extend the life of a repealed statutory provision and defeat taxpayer expectations.