Home Buyer's Tax Credit

If you have signed, or are about to sign, an agreement to buy a newly built home in Ontario, the HST you recover could be anything from nothing to $130,000. The difference usually comes down to a signing date, a price threshold, or whose name is on the purchase agreement, and not to whether you are buying your first home.

If the CRA has served you or your accounting firm with a CRA requirement for information, and you are wondering whether you can refuse it, delay it, or fight it later, the Federal Court of Appeal has now answered that question.

Since 2022, the City of Toronto has imposed an annual Vacant Home Tax (VHT) on residential units left unoccupied for more than six months of the year. For most owners the tax is an afterthought: file the annual declaration, confirm the unit was lived in, and move on. But when the City’s administrative process breaks down, an owner can find themselves fighting a five-figure tax bill over a unit they insist was never vacant at all.

If you hold cryptocurrency, NFTs or other blockchain assets in someone else’s wallet, or hold assets in your own wallet for someone else, the arrangement is very likely a bare trust. Until recently, that carried almost no compliance consequence. It now carries three reporting obligations to track: the T3 filing for 2026, the T1135, and the proposed Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework from 2027.

On July 2, 2026, the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) published its updated Guidance on the Common Reporting Standard (Updated CRS Guidance).

When a specified motor vehicle is acquired through a private sale (for instance, from an individual who is not registered for GST/HST purposes), the transaction is generally not subject to GST/HST.

The Federal Court has approved an $8.7 million class action settlement in Sweet v. His Majesty the King (2026 FC 590), resolving claims from the 2020 credential-stuffing cyberattacks on Government of Canada online accounts accessed via GCKey, including CRA My Account.

Canada has introduced a permanent Productivity Mega Deduction allowing immediate expensing of up to 100% of eligible capital property costs and Canadian development expenses acquired after September 15, 2026. This measure aims to boost business investment and strengthen Canada's tax competitiveness by expanding immediate expensing eligibility from 15% to approximately two-thirds of capital investments, while reducing the country's marginal effective tax rate to 6.4%.

On September 15, 2026 (“Announcement Day”), the Department of Finance released draft legislative proposals to implement the “Productivity Mega Deduction,” permanent 100% first-year (“immediate”) expensing for a wide range of new or used depreciable property and for Canadian development expenses (“CDE”)...

The GST/HST New Housing Rebate lets a purchaser recover part of the GST/HST paid on a newly built or substantially renovated home used as a primary residence.