Capital Gains Chaos: Extensions & Unprecedented Delays to Tax Season 2025

Stop! Don’t file a T1 or T3 tax return yet, says a March 11, 2025, news release from the CRA, if you have been impacted by the chaos of the proposed capital gains inclusion rate increase.

What’s the value of your crypto assets? How much trading did you do?  What’s the tax consequences?  Are they considered to be inventory of a business?  Or will you report a capital gain or loss when you dispose of them?  These are questions professional tax and financial advisors must be able to answer in 2024 when filing 2023 tax returns.  Here’s what you need to know:

Tax specialists can’t ever rest on their laurels, because of the sheer magnitude of change they must address every year:  thousands of pages of tax law, hundreds of new tax forms; and endless new versions of the technology required to transmit the forms to CRA to name a few.  Yet it is the very thing that never changes that will define whether you are running a world class practice that is truly impactful: your relationship with your clients. No matter how tempting it is to drop the personal touch, knowing  and understand the changes in your clients’ lives, will help you apply tax law with greater precision to their tax filings.   Consider the following change impacts:

Drill down on all the latest tax news from CRA and Finance Canada at the Advanced T1 Tax Update Tour, coming to Toronto January 24 and Calgary January 26. There are so many changes that will affect your clients:  the Anti-flipping rules for principle residences, the new Short Term Rental rules, the Alternative Minimum Tax, the Multigenerational Home Renovation Tax Credit, the Intergenerational Business Transfer Rules and so much more.  Plus, it’s a unique peer-to-peer learning opportunity! Can you really afford to miss it?

Artificial Intelligence, climate crisis, tax reporting changes, economic uncertainty, decade high interest rates and inflation, and a looming cost of living crisis…there is no denying the fact that uncertainty and a lot of emotions were at play throughout 2023, where many Real Wealth Management lifestyle, financial, and economic triggers jeopardized our client’s wealth sustainability.  Please join us to hear more about the current Real Wealth Management Triggers that may be impacting your client’s holistic real wealth management plan today at our 360° Real Wealth Management Trigger Tour on February 8 at 10 am CST.

Did you miss the January 17 Virtual CE Summit? There are still ways to get your hands on the knowledge from the Advanced 2024 T1 Tax Update for 2023 Returns and learn your way, at your own pace from the convenience of your home or office.

The EFILE and ReFile services at CRA will officially close for transmission on January 26, 2024 as CRA gets its computers ready to receive 2023 tax returns.  However, records have already been broken in the tax filing world in 2024.  For the first time, over 32 million tax returns were filed with CRA in the period February 6, 2023 to January 5, 2024.  Only 7.7% of these returns were filed on paper, and 0.2% by phone under the File My Return option.  Here are some first glimpses at tax compliance, filing and investment milestones that take effect in January; the start to a tax season, which promises to break tax filing records again, especially because EFILE rules have changed: