Luxury Home Landscape – CRA fails to establish the mailing date of an assessment due to not having a copy of a Canada Post Certificate of Registration

The Crown brought a motion to quash the corporate taxpayer’s notice of appeal from a GST/HST notice of confirmation on the grounds that the notice had not been filed within 90 days of the CRA sending, by registered mail, the notice of confirmation. It sought to prove this date of mailing by filing an affidavit of the CRA Appeals officer.

Russel J found that this affidavit did not satisfy the requirement in ETA s. 335(1) (similar to ITA s. 244(5)) that the affidavit attach “the post office certificate of registration of the letter or a true copy of the relevant portion thereof.” All it did was attach a copy of the form she got back from the CRA mailroom on which someone had affixed the Canada Post tracking number. The Crown’s motion was quashed.

This decision suggests that the wording of ETA s. 335(1)/ ITA s. 244(5) requires CRA's systems to retain and match thousands of copies of Canada Post Certificates to particular taxpayer files.

Neal Armstrong. Summary of Luxury Home Landscape Construction Inc. v. The Queen, 2021 TCC 4 under ETA s. 335(1).