Less overall tax is paid if, rather than Opco paying a taxable dividend to one of its shareholders (A, an individual), A rolls his shares into a new Holdco, Opco redeems the shares now held by Holdco (but without any s. 55(5)(f) designation being made by Holdco so that all of the redemption proceeds are subject to capital gains treatment under s. 55(2)), and then Holdco pays a capital dividend to A. CRA commented:
Although the GAAR Committee considered that [similar] Transactions circumvented the integration principle, it recommended that the GAAR not be applied. The GAAR Committee was of the view that it would be unlikely that the GAAR could be successfully applied to the Transactions given the current state of the jurisprudence.
…The CRA…has expressed [its] concerns to the Department of Finance.
…The CRA will still maintain its position of applying the GAAR and/or subsection 84(2) to cases like The Queen v. Macdonald where a taxpayer uses losses or other tax shelter to reduce a capital gain realized as part of a surplus stripping scheme. Also, the CRA will rely on the reasoning in Descarries where a taxpayer seeks to extract corporate surplus in a manner contrary to the object, spirit or purpose of specific anti-avoidance provisions, such as sections 84.1 and 212.1.