How do I work out the exact date I became a resident of Canada?
Build it from the events rather than from memory. List the day the dwelling became available to you, the day a spouse and dependants arrived, the day employment began, the day the household effects were delivered and the day you last left your former home, then put the supporting document beside each one. On most files those dates cluster within a fortnight and the cluster is the answer. Where they are spread over months, the ones that carry weight are the ones that show where your life actually was, not the ones that are easiest to evidence. Do this before touching a single figure.
Can I choose my departure date to suit my tax position?
The date itself is a finding of fact, so it cannot be nominated. What can be arranged is the order and timing of the underlying events, and only before they happen. Once the dwelling has gone, the family has moved and the employment has ended, the date those things occurred is the date, whatever a return says. This is why the useful conversation happens before a departure rather than in the following spring, when the only remaining question is what the existing facts support. Where the events are already behind you, the work is to identify the supportable date and file consistently with it.
What documents do I need before doing my arrival year tax return?
Start with the ones that fix the date: the lease or purchase documents, the shipping or customs paperwork, the immigration record, the employment offer and start date, and the school or tenancy records for anyone who moved separately. Then the ones the date acts on: statements showing what you held on that day, valuations of property as at that day, and the income records for the months either side of it so they can be split. Assembling the second set before the first is the common false start, because every figure in it has to be recut once the date changes.
My spouse moved months before me, do we have the same date?
Not necessarily. Residence is determined person by person, so a household can straddle a transition with two different dates and two differently split years, even though the tie each spouse has to the other is one of the facts weighed in both determinations. Where one spouse arrives first and establishes the home, the second person's own date is usually earlier than they assume, because the family tie is already in Canada. We take the two chronologies separately, then read each against the other, rather than adopting one date for the household and apportioning both returns to it.
Which comes first, the residency date or the property valuations?
The date, without exception. A deemed acquisition on arrival or a deemed disposition on departure is measured as at the day residence changes, so a valuation obtained for the wrong day is not an approximation of the right answer, it is evidence of a different fact. Clients often arrive with valuations already in hand, prepared as at a month end or the date of a later sale, and those have to be redone. Settle the date, then instruct the valuations to it, then compute. Reversing the first two steps is the most expensive re-work in this kind of file.
Where do I start if my payroll was never changed after I left?
With the date, then the payroll records, then the return. If withholding continued on a resident basis after residence ended, the amounts taken are not wrong in themselves, they are attributed to the wrong period, and the return is what reallocates them. Start by fixing the date from the departure evidence, then obtain the payroll history so each remittance can be placed on the correct side of it, and tell the employer at the same time so the position stops worsening. Filing first and raising the payroll afterwards means doing the same reconciliation twice.
Does keeping a bank account or a house make me resident?
A house available to you is one of the strongest indicators, especially with family living in it. A bank account on its own is a secondary tie that matters only in aggregate. Authorities weigh the whole picture: dwelling, spouse and dependants first, then accounts, licences, memberships and registrations. Leaving with a suitcase while the family home stays occupied rarely ends residency. See keeping a home while abroad.
How does the treaty tie-breaker work when both countries say I am resident?
As a sequence, stopping at the first test that gives an answer: where you have a permanent home available; if in both or neither, where your centre of vital interests is; then habitual abode; then nationality; and if all of those tie, the two tax authorities decide by agreement. It is evidential rather than elective — you do not choose your treaty residence, you demonstrate it, which makes the record of homes, family and time the substance of the claim. See tie-breaking dual residency.
