About Us Practice Areas

Tax and Estate Planning
Tax Litigation
Improving Tax Law

• Estate and succession planning, including the following.
  
  
  • Probate avoidance.
    
    
  • Estate Freezes.
    
    
  • Asset protection and wealth preservation planning.
    
    
  • Trust planning, including the following.
    
    
    • Joint spousal trusts and alter ego trusts.
      
      
    • Testamentary trusts.
      
      
    • Insurance trusts.
      
      
    • Offshore trusts.
    
    
  • Wills Variation Act planning.
  
  
• The design and reorganization of business structures and buy-sell agreements, including the following.
  • Private corporations (including tax-planned shareholder agreements).
    
    
  • Partnerships.
    
    
  • Joint ventures.
    
    
  • Co-ownership structures.
    
    
  • Tax-effective structuring of acquisitions and dispositions.
    
    
  • Tax-effective structuring of buy-sell arrangements.
  
  
• Inbound and outbound investments.
  
  
• Tax aspects of immigration to Canada, including immigration trusts.
  
  
• Tax aspects of emigration from Canada.
  
  
• Employee remuneration plans, including phantom stock plans and stock option plans.
  
  
• Charitable and planned giving.

Top of Page

Members of the firm not only apply the law to the needs of clients - we also seek to influence the design of those laws. On more than one occasion, firm members have identified problems in existing laws and have made suggestions for changes. In early 1999, for example, Blair Dwyer made several submissions to the federal government suggesting that a person should be able to effect an income-tax-deferred transfer of assets to a trust established for the exclusive benefit of that person and his or her spouse. In December of 1999, the federal government released the joint spousal and alter ego trust rules, which included many of Blair's suggestions.

Top of Page