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Interpreting The Income Tax Act - Part 1: Interpretive Doctrines, David G. Duff
Interpreting The Income Tax Act - Part 1: Interpretive Doctrines, David G. Duff
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This two-part article discusses the various doctrines to which Canadian courts have referred in interpreting the Income Tax Act, evaluates these doctrines, and proposes an alternative "pragmatic" approach that offers a more open, reasoned, and balanced method of statutory interpretation than each of the alternatives otherwise available. Part 1 of the article reviews the four main doctrines applied by Canadian courts in interpreting the Income Tax Act: strict construction, purposive interpretation, the plain meaning rule, and the words-in-total context approach. After the characteristics of each of these four doctrines have been explained, the article examines leading tax cases in which …
Interpreting The Income Tax Act - Part 2: Toward A Pragmatic Approach, David G. Duff
Interpreting The Income Tax Act - Part 2: Toward A Pragmatic Approach, David G. Duff
All Faculty Publications
Part 1 of this two-part article reviewed the four main doctrines to which Canadian courts have referred in interpreting the Income Tax Act (strict construction, purposive interpretation, the plain meaning rule, and the words-in-total-context approach) and examined leading cases in which these doctrines have been defined and applied. Part 2 of the article evaluates each of the interpretive doctrines examined in part 1 and develops, as an alternative, an explicitly "pragmatic" approach. This alternative approach builds on the words-in-total-context doctrine by interpreting the words of the Act "in their entire context," having regard to the scheme of the Act, the …