You can see in this situation that obviously you weren't expecting this court case to come out in 2000. There was another one in 2003 ruling that in the case of anybody receiving amounts of a purchase price that were allocated to a restrictive covenant, the moneys were to be handled on a tax-free basis. The minister at the time--that's back seven years ago--indicated that the government would amend the Income Tax Act.
I am assuming that every tax practitioner in Canada started allocating large sums to restrictive covenants because the money flowed tax-free, but the way I look at is that it's personal income tax. It's too late now for CRA to go back and challenge anything done prior to 2007. That money is all gone, and until this is done....
I should point out that's exactly what Conrad Black was up to, except that it was a little different in that it was a publicly traded company. The only problem Conrad Black and his partner David Radler had was that the United States securities commission and the United States court weren't as enthusiastic as they were here in Canada about that transaction.
Would you not agree with me that this would be a lot of money lost to the Canadian taxpayers? It has to be.