Why is the CRA asking me to prove I left Canada?
A residency determination review tests a conclusion you already took on a return: that you ceased to be resident on a particular day. The review looks at your ties, and it looks at them in both directions — what you gave up in Canada and what you established in the new country. Because the file is decided on the evidence available for the years in question, the request usually arrives long after the move, when leases, closing documents and school records are hardest to assemble. The question is not whether you intended to leave. It is whether the record shows that you did.
What counts as a significant tie to Canada?
Ties are weighted rather than counted. The significant ties carry the most weight — a dwelling available to you, a spouse or common-law partner, and dependants who remain — and one unresolved significant tie can hold a residency conclusion open on its own. Secondary ties support the picture rather than decide it: they either explain a pattern or undermine it. In practice a review that finds no significant tie still reads the secondary ties to see whether the departure looks real, so the useful work is closing the significant ties cleanly and being able to show when each one ended.
Can a tax treaty override the CRA's residency decision?
It can. Where the domestic law of both countries makes you resident, the treaty tie-breaker decides which country treats you as resident for treaty purposes, and that conclusion can override the domestic answer the CRA reached. Two things follow. The tie-breaker only helps if the other country actually treats you as resident, so the foreign side of the file has to be in order first. And the tie-breaker is applied to facts rather than assertions — the same evidence about home, family and personal connections is read again, in a different order. A treaty argument does not replace the evidence work. It reorganises it.
I kept my bank account and credit cards, does that make me resident?
Not by itself. Accounts, cards, a driving licence, memberships and a mailing address are secondary ties. They rarely decide a review, but they are the first things a reviewer can verify without asking you, so a file with several of them left open invites a closer look at the significant ties. The practical answer is to be able to explain each one: what it is for, why it stayed, and whether anything about it suggests you carried on living here. An account kept open to service a mortgage reads differently from a home kept available and used.
What evidence should I have kept when I moved abroad?
The evidence that decides these reviews is contemporaneous: documents created at the time, by someone other than you. Sale or lease closing papers for the Canadian home, the lease or purchase abroad, the employment contract, the dates dependants started school, utility accounts opened and closed, and the foreign tax filings that show the other country treating you as resident. Built as you go, this is a determination. Built afterwards, out of memory and reconstruction, the same file becomes a dispute, argued from a weaker position several years later.
Can I still fix a residency review years after moving?
Yes, and most of this work is done years after the fact. What changes with time is not your rights but the quality of the record. Registries, employers, schools, banks and foreign tax authorities still hold documents you no longer have, so a large part of the work is going back to those sources rather than writing a narrative. Where a gap cannot be closed, the honest course is to say so and rest the position on the ties that can be proven. A reviewer can weigh an incomplete record. An overstated one costs credibility on every other point.
I work remotely from another country for a company back home — who taxes me?
Usually the country you are physically in, because employment income is generally sourced where the work is done, with your residence country taxing it as well if you are resident there and giving credit. Three things follow: your employer may acquire withholding and social security obligations where you sit, a treaty tie-breaker may be needed if both countries call you resident, and a short trip that becomes a long stay can cross a residence threshold nobody was watching. See remote workers and digital nomads.
Do dual citizens pay taxes in both countries?
Both countries can have a claim, but paying double taxes on the same dollar is the exception rather than the rule. The United States taxes its citizens wherever they live; Canada, India and most others tax on residence. So a dual citizen living in one of them often files in both — a resident return in one, a citizen return in the other — while the credit and exclusion rules mean the total is usually close to the higher of the two, not the sum. Filing twice is not paying twice. See two returns as a dual citizen.
