Mr. Chair, this is based on some conversations I had and some things I've read about a marriage penalty. I'm going to refer to the submission of the Joint Committee on Taxation of The Canadian Bar Association and Chartered Professional Accountants of Canada. In their appendix, they say that the “relationship breakdown exclusion is too narrow”, according to them, and they go into the details. I'm not a tax lawyer, and I'm not a tax accountant, but this is a friendly amendment to make this work better.
I'm just trying to get at the situation where there would be a breakdown in a couple's relationship, whether it's a marriage or a common-law relationship. I'm going to read a portion of this appendix. They say:
In many cases where a couple involved in a family business separates, one of the spouses or common-law partners will receive assets in his or her holding corporation through a paragraph 55(3)(a) spin-off transaction. In such arrangements, because the transfer of assets occurs between the operating corporation and the holding corporation, the spouse or common-law partner will not have received property personally in a manner described in subsection 160(4). As a result, that spouse or common-law partner will be unable to take advantage of paragraph (b) of the definition of “excluded amount”, even though the economic substance of the arrangement is similar to a property transfer to the spouse or—