The taxpayer was found to continue to be the beneficial owner of shares that he transferred to a protective trust of which he was the sole beneficiary and one of the three trustees. The trust deed provided broad powers of management to the trustees, accorded them the discretion to pay out income and capital to the taxpayer at any time and provided that the trust property was to be distributed no later than the 21st anniversary of the trust. Woods, J. noted (at para. 36) that "although the term 'beneficial ownership' is often used in the sense of full ownership except bare legal title", the ordinary meaning of the term is quite broad and includes a sole beneficiary's interest in trust property. This broad meaning was reflected in former s. 248(3)(f) (respecting Quebec properties, and similar to s. 248(3)(e)(iii) of the current Act), which she stated (at para. 43) "is designed to provide harmonization of transactions across the country." Although, in contrast to the terms of the trust at issue in Trans-Canada Investment, the taxpayer here did not have the right to require delivery of the trust corpus at any time, this merely indicated that the taxpayer in that Supreme Court decision may have had ownership, rather than merely beneficial ownership, of the shares held in the trust in that case.
Accordingly, there was no disposition of the shares (on the basis that, under the exclusion in s. (v) of the definition of “disposition,” the transfer of legal ownership occurred "without any change in the beneficial ownership") and, therefore, no taxable capital gain was realized by the taxpayer.