Executive Summary: Key Legal and Evidentiary Issues

• Christine Ng sought an extension of time to object to a GST/HST Notice of Reassessment dated November 4, 2019, under the Excise Tax Act, alleging the NOR was first mailed to her only in 2024.

• The application to the Minister was not received until September 10, 2024 — well beyond the statutory one-year-and-ninety-day deadline, which expired on February 3, 2021.

• CRA presented two affidavits detailing its mailing procedures and confirming the NOR was sent to the condo address the Applicant herself had provided.

• Ms. Ng did not update her mailing address with the CRA after moving out of the condo in July 2018, and did not call her former roommate to corroborate that all mail was properly forwarded.

• Under subsection 334(1) of the Excise Tax Act, actual receipt of the NOR by the taxpayer is irrelevant — the Minister need only show the NOR was sent to the proper address.

• The Court, applying the four-step framework from Dasilva v HMQ, found the Minister satisfied the burden of proof, resulting in dismissal of the application without costs.

The purchase and the rebate application

On July 23, 2014, Christine Qingru Ng signed an agreement, along with a second party, to purchase a condominium in the Young and Eglinton area of Toronto, Ontario. She moved into the condo on August 28, 2017, prior to the closing of the purchase and sale transaction on April 5, 2018. On April 4, 2018, the day before closing, Ms. Ng signed the application for the GST/HST New Housing Rebate Application for Houses Purchased from a Builder. On that application, she provided the condo as her mailing address and signed a statutory declaration stating that the condo was her principal residence. Notably, in 2024, in her request to the Minister for an extension of time to object, the document prepared by the Applicant continued to use the condo as her home address.

A change of address and a critical oversight

On July 15, 2018, Ms. Ng moved out of the condo, having signed a lease to live elsewhere in Toronto. No evidence was provided that the Applicant updated her address with the CRA. Part of her testimony was that she continued to receive mail from the condo after she moved out, the mail being forwarded to her by the remaining tenant in the condo. However, Ms. Ng did not call her old roommate to corroborate that all mail received at the condo was properly forwarded. If the Minister did in fact mail the NOR, Ms. Ng would only have received it if her old roommate, still living at the condo, forwarded the mail to her. The Applicant has resided in London, England, since 2023.

The Notice of Reassessment and the delayed objection

The Notice of Reassessment in question is dated November 4, 2019. The Applicant alleged that the NOR was first mailed to her in 2024, as part of the CRA's attempt to collect an outstanding balance, and therefore contended she was within the timelines set out in the Act to object. Her application to the Minister to extend time was received on September 10, 2024. Under the Excise Tax Act, a taxpayer may file a notice of objection within 90 days after the day on which the notice of assessment is sent. Failing that, an application for an extension of time must be made within one year after the expiration of the 90-day objection period. No notice of objection was provided by the Applicant within 90 days of the NOR's date of mailing, and no request for an extension of time was filed on or before February 3, 2021, which was a year and 90 days following the date of mailing the NOR.

The Minister's evidence on mailing

In response to Ms. Ng's application, the Minister filed two affidavits. The first was sworn by Purvik Patel, from the Toronto litigation office of the Canada Revenue Agency. His evidence was that the CRA maintained information pertaining to the printing and mailing of the NOR to Ms. Ng, and that the NOR was released by the CRA on October 31, 2019, with a Notice date of November 4, 2019. He also provided evidence that the NOR was sent to the address for the condo provided by the Applicant. The second affidavit was sworn by Mr. Wade Smith, a CRA print manager, who provided evidence as to the CRA's practices in respect of mailing procedures. His evidence described how GST NORs are produced electronically, generated to the "Print to Mail" section, reconciled through control reports and job tickets, and tracked from production to delivery to Canada Post using the BOWE ONE system. Envelopes have "see through" windows whereby the NOR address itself provides the mailing address, and any job which does not reconcile is gathered, destroyed, and re-run rather than manually corrected. Mr. Smith confirmed that overall, there were no inconsistencies, anomalies, or error reports concerning any part of the production run or sequences concerning the NOR in issue.

The legal framework applied by the Court

Justice MacPhee noted that a very similar matter was recently decided by Justice Bocock in Fraser v His Majesty the King, 2025 TCC 153, which succinctly summarized the relevant legislation and case law. The Court applied the four-step analytical framework originally set out by Justice Graham in Dasilva v HMQ, 2018 TCC 74. Under this framework, the taxpayer must first assert that the notice of assessment was not sent. The Minister must then introduce sufficient evidence to prove, on a balance of probabilities, that the notice was indeed sent to the proper address. If the Minister succeeds, the sending is presumed to have occurred on the date set out on the notice under subsection 335(10), which is a rebuttable presumption. Finally, under subsection 334(1), the notice is deemed to have been received on the date it was mailed, and Step 4 makes it clear that the fact that a taxpayer did not actually receive the notice of assessment is irrelevant.

The ruling and outcome

Justice MacPhee found the Applicant to be a truthful witness and accepted her testimony that she never received the NOR, and that when she was made aware of its existence, she acted immediately. Yet, the Court held, this was not the end of the matter. The Minister need not ensure personal service on the Applicant, nor ensure that she received the NOR — the Minister must only show that the NOR was sent to the proper address on November 4, 2019. The Court found that the Minister's evidence was sufficient to show, based on the balance of probabilities, that the NOR was sent to the address provided by Ms. Ng on November 4, 2019. The evidence led the Court to conclude that the NOR was not forwarded to the Applicant by her old roommate after it was mailed to the condo. Justice MacPhee therefore dismissed the application for an extension of time to object, as the application was far past the one-year-and-ninety-day deadline. The Respondent, His Majesty the King, was the successful party. There was no order as to costs, and no specific monetary amount was determined in this proceeding, as the ruling addressed solely the procedural question of timeliness rather than the substantive merits of the reassessment.