Many of our members are impacted, and the real issue is they don't know how they're impacted. That is due to the complexity and the lack of description or scenarios they can rely on. When you're working with income tax, you can read the Income Tax Act and you can read the explanatory notes, but you really decide on how to structure something once you see how the Department of Finance or the CRA has interpreted that legislation. Sometimes we don't understand the context behind it.
The issue is we don't really know what the compliance cost is yet, because once our members have changed the way they are being compensated.... For example, our members who had children who were in university had to change how they funded that university education. They had to take more money out of the business in order to fund the education. Once the dust settles and we go a few years in, and CRA comes in to audit somebody's interpretation of the legislation, it's hard to say what the costs will be.
That's the other issue with many changes. CRA is not set up for success. The majority of the CRA auditors I've dealt with want to and try to do a good job, but they are hit with so many changes—every year there are hundreds of changes they try to understand—that there comes a point where it's going to go to court and it's going to be another three or four years before it's settled. Again, it's the inconsistency and not knowing what's going to happen.