Finance committee  The principal residence exemption gives you an exemption on the sale of your home, one per family, and it's limited to Canadian residents. If you sell your home partway through the year, you'll most likely buy a new home if you're moving, so you will have had two principal residences in that year.

Finance committee  I—

Finance committee  Citizenship doesn't tend to matter for Canadian income tax purposes. It's residency.

Finance committee  There are changes relating to the use of trusts to claim the capital gains exemption, which essentially restrict it to certain classes of trusts, to spousal trusts and the like, and those, just to be clear, could prevent multiplication of principal residence exemptions as between Canadian residents.

Finance committee  I'm not aware of any list of countries that use the accrual basis for their taxation. I can ask, but I simply don't know the answer to that question.

Finance committee  As I said, this proposed measure arose in the context of the tax expenditure review, a comprehensive review of the system of tax expenditures we have in the act, looking at not just tax credits but also at preferential deferral systems of the kind we have here. Outside experts were brought in, and this was started well over a year ago.

Finance committee  As I said, it exists as a separate regime for the designated list of professionals, and it's important to keep in mind that the general rules apply not just to industry generally but to other classes of professionals who for many years—decades, even—have managed to make estimations of what the fair market value of the work in progress is and have been able to work within those rules.

Finance committee  One of the fundamental aspects of the general tax rules and tax systems—this comes from Supreme Court decisions in IKEA and Canderel—is that tax rules ought to provide taxation on the truest picture of your income. To that end, the basic scheme of the act, currently, for a large majority of taxpayers, requires accrual accounting, which means that in any year, you pay tax on the amount that you earn in that year.

Finance committee  Sorry, is this clause 30 of the bill?

Finance committee  Right. That's probably the reference in subclause 30(1). Part of the package of technical amendments that were released in September 2016 are intended to be technical and housekeeping measures. Many of these correct oversights and mistakes made in past bills. In this case, the name “Canadian Payments Act” had changed several years ago, whenever the amendment was effective.

Finance committee  Yes, that's correct.

Finance committee  It's just dealing with the deferral. As I said—

Finance committee  The estimates that were included as part of the budget were $425 million over the horizon mentioned in the budget. That, as I said, was based upon a two-year deferral, so it would be extended beyond the cut-off date of 2021.

Finance committee  No. The elimination of the deferral, which would bring into income all the deferred income, would total $425 million, but that would be once there's a move to an accrual system. You'll see in the budget materials that there are no revenue projections beyond the 2019-20 year. Of course that would be later under the revised proposals.

Finance committee  It's because it's a timing question.