Empowering Non-Profit Businesses in Canada With Affordable Tax Filing

Yes. Rent you receive is taxable income. You report the gross rents, subtract deductible expenses such as mortgage interest, property tax, insurance, utilities you pay, repairs, condominium fees and advertising, and the net rental profit is added to your other income and taxed at your marginal rate. There is no separate rental tax rate. A rental loss can generally offset other income where the property is genuinely rented at fair market value.

A write-off is simply a deductible expense. You subtract it from the income it helped earn, so the saving equals the expense multiplied by your marginal tax rate, not the full amount spent. To qualify, the cost must be incurred to earn business or employment income, be reasonable in amount, and be backed by a receipt. Purely personal costs never qualify, and mixed-use items such as a vehicle or a home office are split by business-use proportion.

A T4E is the statement of Employment Insurance and other benefits. Service Canada issues one for each year in which EI was paid, covering regular, sickness, maternity, parental, caregiving or fishing benefits, and it shows the total received, the income tax already withheld and any amount to be repaid. Those figures go on the personal return for that year. Benefits paid under a different program come on their own slip.

Property tax is an annual charge a municipality levies on real estate to fund local services such as roads, water, policing, fire and schools. A provincial assessment authority values the property, council sets a tax rate in its budget, and the bill is the assessed value multiplied by the rate for your property class. Unpaid amounts stay attached to the property itself. It is separate from income tax, so the city bills it, not the CRA.

The CRA does not offer a general public chat line for tax advice. Account-specific service runs through its telephone lines, My Account or My Business Account, and mail, and the Contact the CRA page on canada.ca lists what each option covers, including automated lines for balances and benefit dates. Treat any chat window on a site that is not canada.ca as a phishing risk and never type your social insurance number into one.

No. The fuel charge applies to fuels, not tobacco. Cigarettes carry federal excise duty, a provincial or territorial tobacco tax, and GST or HST on the shelf price, which is why tax makes up most of what you pay. Duty and tobacco tax rates move with budgets and some federal rates are adjusted annually, so check the CRA excise duty rates page and your province's tobacco tax page rather than an older figure.

Canada has no tax-lien certificate market like the United States. Where property taxes go unpaid, the municipality eventually sells the property itself at a tax sale under provincial rules, with public notice, a minimum bid and tight deposit deadlines; you buy the land, not a lien, and often with limited ability to inspect it. CRA liens are not sold to investors. Any profit on resale is taxable, as business income or a capital gain depending on your intent.

Your municipality sets that, not the CRA. Most Canadian municipalities issue an interim bill and a final bill each year, each payable in one or more instalments, and many also offer a monthly pre-authorised plan spread across the year. If your mortgage lender pays the tax on your behalf, you contribute a portion with each mortgage payment instead. Your tax bill or your municipality's website lists the exact instalment dates for your property.

Holding a share outright cannot leave you owing money. The worst outcome is that it becomes worthless. You can end up owing money if you bought on margin, sold short, or invested with borrowed funds, because the debt survives the loss. On the tax side, a fall in value creates nothing to report; a loss only crystallises when you dispose of the shares, and a capital loss is applied against capital gains rather than against ordinary income.

Federal personal income tax arrived in 1917, when the Income War Tax Act was passed as a temporary measure to help finance the First World War. It reached only a small number of high earners at first, and although it was passed as a temporary wartime measure the tax was never withdrawn: the Income War Tax Act was replaced by a new Income Tax Act after the Second World War, and today's Act descends from that line. A federal tax on business profits had been introduced the year before, and the personal system broadened steadily over the following decades as rates, credits and withholding were added.

No. A non-profit that sells taxable goods or services must register and charge GST/HST once it passes the small-supplier threshold, the same as any business, at the combined rate for the province of supply. Only particular supplies are exempt, and the exempting rules for non-profits are narrower than those for registered charities. A qualifying non-profit, broadly one funded substantially by government, may claim a public service body rebate for part of the tax it cannot recover as input tax credits.

No. Non-profit describes how an organisation is set up and how it may use its funds; tax exempt describes how it is treated for one particular tax. A non-profit can be exempt from income tax and still have to register for and charge GST/HST, remit payroll deductions, and file annual information returns. Only a registered charity or other qualified donee can issue receipts that donors use to claim a credit, and charitable registration is a separate application to the CRA.