CRA indicates that a corporation’s factual residence can abide elsewhere than the situs of its board meetings

Responding to a query as to whether CRA will continue to have “too much focus on the location of board meetings” in determining corporate residency, CRA adverted to the general principle enunciated in De Beers ([1906] AC 455, at 458) that “a company resides for purposes of income tax where its real business is carried on … and the real business is carried on where the central management and control actually abides,” stated that De Beers indicated that a corporation’s central management and control “must … be determined after a scrutiny of the whole ‘course of business and trading’ of the corporation” - and then reiterated its position that:

[T]he presence of board meetings in the country in which the corporation is asserting residence would not, in and of itself, be sufficient to conclude that the corporation is resident in that country. … The courts have repeatedly considered evidence beyond the location of board meetings in order to look at the whole “course of business and trading” of a corporation.

Neal Armstrong. Summary of 17 May 2022 IFA Roundtable, Q.10 under s. 2(1).