No, I can't. I don't believe that was the intention of the regulation.
Prior to 1994, we did have a rule in our regulations that attempted to say that treaty countries, countries with which Canada had a tax treaty, qualified for exempt surplus treatment. That listing procedure was not very effective. At the time of its change in 1994, we had about ten countries on the list with which we did not have tax treaties. We might have had negotiations started with them, but we did not have tax treaties in effect, and I think we were getting behind so that there were about ten new countries with which we did have tax treaties that weren't on the list.
So trying to do a better job of it, and a more effective job of it, we changed the regulation to say that it had to be a country with which we have a tax treaty. We weren't going to run through a list. We were going to have as a condition that it had to be a country with which you had a tax treaty and the particular company in question had to be resident in that country, for purposes of the treaty. It was intended to, as I say, clean up our listing requirement. After the regulation was issued in draft form in the budget, we received some questions from a couple of tax firms, asking whether or not this was intended to affect any of our existing treaties, because you could read those treaties as perhaps saying that if a company weren't resident for all purposes, or weren't entitled to treaty benefits in all cases, that perhaps the regulation as drafted could have application to it.
Our answer was that it did not, and we issued letters—I think those are what you're referring to—to a number of people in the tax community who had written to ask us about this, saying that wasn't the intention of the regulation. The regulation was revised and it was passed to reflect its original intentions.
