A simple question is behind the victory of the Tax Court of Patrick of Kruyff in Canada last month on the Canadian Revenue Agency (CRA): Who demons would suggest taking Don Valley Parkway of Toronto in the peak time?
An auditor in Vancouver, that is the one.
The Financial Advisor with headquarters in Toronto uses the words “smoking gun” when describing the key discovery that helped him win a five -year battle for the CRA to accept his request to deduce relocation expenses after he moved to live closer to work in 2020.
The basic rule for deduction is that the movement has to cut at least 40 kilometers from the daily trip.
But for some reason, Google Maps continued giving the CRA a route much shorter than Kryuff, despite the fact that both hit the same coordinates at the same time of Monday to Friday: the heart of the peak hour, 4:45 pm
And then, from Kruyff he found the defect that led to a decision to establish precedents that could pave the path for fiscal deduction for other urban travelers: the CRA employee was in BC, obtaining the suggestions of Google Maps to navigate the traffic of Toronto at 4:45 pm, Pacific time.
That is 7:45 pm east.
“Judicial warning and empirical common sense of any motorist in the city of the Divines of Toronto that traffic conditions in Don Valley Parkway/404 are dramatically different between 4:45 pm and 7:45 pm of one average week day,” wrote Judge Randall Bock of the Tax Court, Randall Bocock.
“A reasonable person would continue and adhere to the route suggested by Google Maps that [de Kruyff] He has done it. Frankly, the CRA has also done, only incorrectly due to the time zone paste“
‘A mile in Toronto is very different’
The Bocock ruling highlights the evolution of a provision of the Canadian Income Tax Law that the courts have forced to adapt to the tangled growth of the country’s cities and the experience of travelers aware in the shortest way from point A to point B is not always the fastest.
Beyond the details of De Kruyff’s statement, the case is also significant because the judge recognized the use of Google Maps to calculate “the shortest normal route” to comply with the 40 -kilometer threshold for a claim of relocation expenses, the very close language of the legislation.
“He felt as a victory not only for me, but for people in general,” Kruyff told CBC News.
“A mile in Toronto is very different from one mile in other jurisdictions, so it may not look at it from a distance, but from the point of view of synchronization. Because in BC, if you live in Prince Rupert, a 40 -kilometer trip could be 20 minutes, while in Toronto that could be one more hour.”
Kruyff moved from Newmarket to Mississauga in January 2020. He works from nine to five in a work in the center of Toronto, and as Bock points out “like many other office workers in the GTA, fight against traffic that travels every day to the office. Flexible time does not apply.”
“I remember talking to my doctor, receiving an annual check -up. He said ‘Caramba, what is happening?'” Remember the 48 -year -old.
“I said, it’s the trip. He said you should change it, because if something is going to shorten your life, it will be that.”
According to Kruyff’s decision, he spent almost $ 130,000 in motion, a figure that, he says, has raised his eyebrows. But he says that housing owners can ignore the relocation of tax claims may include expenses such as real estate agents and land transfer rates.
Anyway, the CRA rejected its initial claim, insisting on the travel distance between its new and old trip only weighed 32.8 kilometers, not the 47.4 kilometers that Google Maps was telling him.
‘In a straight line’
The courts have been considering battles on claims for income tax for income for decades.
In 1995, the Federal Court of Appeals intervened in the question of whether the eligible distance should be measured “in a straight line, that is, ‘while the crow flies’, or following a normal travel route?”
In that case, a research interviewer moved from Stony Plain to Edmonton to be closer to Alberta University. But while his odometer said that his new residence was 44 kilometers closer, the CRA said the distance, drawn with a rule, was only 36 kilometers.
“Usually, a taxpayer travels to work using ordinary public travel routes, that is, roads, roads, railways,” the Court of Appeals found.
“When determining if the taxpayer has really approached 40 kilometers to work, it only makes sense to measure the distance you have moved using real travel routes. The straight line method is not related to the way an employee travels to function.”
The CRA took that advice seriously, and in 2007, in 2007, when the agency rejected the relocation claim of another Toronto man because it was technically possible to fall under the limit of 40 kilometers with a route that involves 18 left turns and 19 turns to the right on 40 roads.
The judge of the fiscal court Donald Bowman was not kind.
“The Slalom turned suggested by the crown is not realistic, or normal, or reasonable or common. It is somehow even more meaningful than the straight line approach,” the judge wrote.
“The straight line approach would at least make sense for a crow. The 40 -road approach in Zigzag makes sense to anyone.”
‘It was a great day’
Like taxpayers in both previous cases, Kruyff took only the lawyers of the CRA.
He says that he interrogated the auditor based in Vancouver that he would have made him travel through Don Valley Parkway at the height of the peak hour, and she noticed that the rules of the CRA to calculate the distance have no assignment during the time of day.
Kruyff says he raised that point in his final arguments.
“I think that the question we have to consider is based on current technology, being Google Maps and things in real time, then move the idea of the most common and shorter route to the idea of the shortest and most short route at a specific time,” he said.
Bocock finally agreed.
“Ignoring changing dynamics, which is the use of this omnipresent software, makes the law obsolete, little reflected and frankly inaccurate,” he wrote.
“This most likely ‘traps’ of the Court and the law at a time now to which lawyers and paper judges cling nostalgically, but from which the broader audience has emerged with enthusiasm by touching smartphones in their hands and under the command of the GPS in their cars.”
Kruyff learned about email victory on a working day around 4 pm et.
“It was a great day,” he says.
He called his wife and daughter. Then he got on his car and led home.
