The taxpayer assisted its clients in acquiring minority shares in "Tech Wreck" corporations that had become insolvent, with a view to their accessing the substantial pool of losses from the old businesses. Mactavish J. granted the Minister's ex parte application to require the taxpayer to disclose its client list. The purpose of the requirement was demonstrably to verify an ascertainable group's compliance with the Act, given that the taxpayer would clearly know which of its clients participated in the scheme and given provisions of the Act which targeted loss trading. Mactavish J. noted that the Minister "no longer needs to show that the Requirement Order relates to a 'genuine and serious inquiry' into the tax liability of a specific person or persons,'" and that it was enough to show a good faith attempt to verify compliance (para. 50).
There was no merit to the taxpayer's submission that the Minister's application had failed to disclose that the information sought could have been obtained by mining its own databases or through the System for Electronic Document Analysis and Retrieval (SEDAR). Neither of these systems would enable the Minister to identify which loss companies were being used, and neither system would reveal the identities of the clients (because their ownership percentages were too low).