This is one of the “stealth” items in the budget. The tax-free savings account actually extends the principle of income splitting to investment income for all people, not just people of a certain age receiving pension incomes. If you read the fine print in the ways and means motion, you see that the government is saying they are going to create a legal exemption for the tax-free savings plan.
If parent number one has a lot of money sitting in the bank, that parent can put $5,000 into his or her tax-free savings account, and the earnings on it will then be tax-exempt for the rest of that person's life. That person can also put another $5,000 into his or her spouse's or cohabitant's tax-free savings account and another $5,000 into the account of any child.
So for every family member, another $5,000 can be put in. Functionally, what this means in tax law is that this income can be treated as if it were earned tax-free by the other members of the family, but taxpayer number one, parent number one, keeps legally owning it. It's basically using everybody else in the family as sort of a tax shelter. The attribution rules—