What am I teaching now?
In the Fall 2025 term, I am teaching the introductory tax course in French (4-6 T/Th) and English (6-8 T/Th) (two sections) as well as international taxation (English) 2:30-4 M/W.
Office hours: Wednesdays 1-2:15
Use Word's Style formatting tools to organize your document so you can analyze its structure and flow for better academic writing.
really basic rules for diagramming commercial, corporate and tax law scenarios
Introduction to Tax Policy theory:
How to write a case comment
A case comment is designed to introduce a reader to a case and situate it within its topical, analytical, historical and social context. The point of the case comment is not simply to summarize or exhaustively re-state the case. Instead it is to focus the reader on a particular aspect of the case that is significant or interesting in some way. Your description of the case should begin with a few impactful sentences that lay out the controversy (why are the parties in court), the respective parties’ core positions, and the outcome of the case (taxpayer wins or government wins). A good case comment will have considered the factors that led the parties to take the controversy to the courts and it should help the reader who may not have read the case get the main ideas that emerge in the decision.
Include the name of the case, its proper citation, and a link, preferably to CanLII, as well links to lower court decisions and that judge’s or those judges’ names, if you are presenting an appellate decision (TCC or FC decision and FCA decision, if any).
A good case comment begins from the start of the reading process. When reading tax decisions, the particular takeaway may not be the ratio decidendi of the case. It is perhaps more important to see how the judge(s) reasoned with the lower court decisions or the statutory framework (i.e., their construction of the Act’s words). Also, as a reminder that tax is a team sport, note that your reading of a particular passage or provision may be different than that of your teammate(s). Explore why you and your teammate(s) arrive at different readings. Discussion brings cases to life and often exposes more thoroughly areas we thought we understood.
A good case comment tells a story about the case. It should be dynamic, use active voice, and avoid abstraction and cliché. It should be short, well written, punchy, to the point, non-repetitive, and informative. When you write a case comment it can be helpful to think of yourself as a journalist and ask yourself the questions that order a news story: who, what, when, where, and why. Who is in court? Why are they in court? What problem are they trying to solve? What approaches and sources did they use to persuade the judge(s) to see things their way? How did the judge(s) approach the problem? What issues were resolved, and what issues were not resolved? Provide answers to these questions.
A great case comment will locate information about the parties, their transactions, or the evolution of the applicable law that isn’t included in the case, but that lends clarity to the narrative of the case or the particular “mischief” at play. Most of all, a great case comment provides an original and critical take on the particular issues of the case.
Tax opinion letter
Units of federal legislation
This handy chart is essential to anyone writing a legal memo in Canada involving federal income tax law + any other federal statutory regime.
It tells you how to identify a specific part of legislation in Canada.
For example, if you are looking at a provision of a federal Act online that starts with a lower case roman numeral in parentheses, you will know that you are looking at something that is called a “subparagraph” in English and un “sous-alinéa” en Français.
When writing out a specific provision, it is customary to state only the unit associated with the last numeral according to its format. For example if you are looking at the rule that says to include in income the value of an employee benefit related to the use of an automobile, you would not refer to “subparagraph (iii) of paragraph (a) of subsection (1) of section 6” or “le sous-alinéa (iii) de l’alinéa a) du paragraphe (1) de l’article 6). That’s way too clunky.
Instead, you would refer to the relevant provision as “subparagraph 6(1)(a)(iii)” aka “le sous-alinéa 6(1)a)(iii)
Knowing the correct unit of legislation will help you figure out where to look when someone points you to a provision, and vice versa.