Executive Summary: Key Legal and Evidentiary Issues

• Central dispute concerns whether Ms. Anyck Béraud remained a Québec tax resident from 2017–2019 and January 2021 despite long-term foreign postings and a marital home in Paris.

• Tribunal weighs the continuing residential ties created by Ms. Béraud’s fully maintained Montréal condo and Québec-based employment against her personal life and time spent in France and China.

• Considerable emphasis is placed on inconsistencies between Ms. Béraud’s tax filings (declaring China as residence), her answers during verification, and her later claim that France was her fiscal residence.

• Evidence regarding use of Québec banking, RAMQ status, permits, insurance, and condo-related participation is assessed to determine whether her Québec modus vivendi was truly broken.

• Court applies and synthesizes case law on tax residence and the presumption of validity of assessments, concluding that the taxpayer failed to rebut the presumption and that Revenu Québec proved Québec residence.

• Interpretation of article 93.1.18 of the Loi sur l’administration fiscale clarifies that it limits court filing fees only and does not prevent the Court from awarding legal costs (frais de justice) against an individual taxpayer.

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Factual background
Ms. Anyck Béraud is a veteran journalist with Société Radio-Canada, working predominantly with the French-language services based in Montréal. Over the course of her career, she has been posted multiple times abroad as a foreign correspondent, including a significant assignment in Europe earlier in the 2010s, during which she lived and worked in Paris. It is during that European posting that she met her future husband, a French citizen, Mr. Gonzague Phélip, who owns an apartment in Paris. She soon began spending most of her off-duty time in that Paris apartment and even contributed to renovation works, signalling the growing importance of this residence in her personal life. After that European assignment ended in 2014, she returned to Québec and immediately purchased a condominium in Montréal. She also owned a separate condominium in Gatineau which she continuously rented out. Montréal remained the organizational “home base” for her work, since Radio-Canada’s French services are headquartered there, and she would regularly return for professional obligations such as the annual “semaine des correspondants,” as well as to visit close family, including siblings and her daughter.
From 23 January 2017 to 31 October 2020, Ms. Béraud was posted to Asia/Oceania as a foreign correspondent, stationed in Beijing, China. Radio-Canada paid the greater part of her rent in Beijing and reimbursed many relocation and set-up expenses, as part of its standard foreign posting conditions. The employer also required her to extend her RAMQ health coverage for as long as possible and then provided a private medical insurance regime to take over when public coverage ended. During this time, her salary continued to be paid into a Québec bank account, and Radio-Canada arranged for her to make tax filings with Chinese authorities through designated firms.
Between 2017 and 2019, she divided her time between China, France and Québec, spending more days in China than anywhere else, and more days in France than in Québec, but regularly returning to Québec for work and family. Meanwhile, the Montréal condo was kept fully furnished, connected to cable, internet and telephone, and was never rented on a long-term basis, although close family and friends occasionally used it on a revolving, informal basis. The Gatineau condo, by contrast, remained a rental property until it was sold.
In late 2020, following the end of the Beijing posting and amid the COVID-19 context, Ms. Béraud was deployed to Washington, D.C., from 1 November 2020 until the end of January 2021 to cover the U.S. elections and the inauguration of President Joe Biden. After that short posting, she returned to Québec, registered again with the RAMQ and, as of February 2021, declared herself a resident of Québec for tax purposes. She has since worked primarily from Québec, occasionally travelling abroad as a special correspondent rather than on long-term foreign postings.

Tax filings, verification and the competing residency narrative
For the 2017 taxation year, Ms. Béraud initially filed as a Québec resident, as she had in prior years. Only in 2019, following advice from a professional accountant, did she amend her 2017 return and then file 2018 and 2019 declaring herself as a non-resident of Québec, with China identified as her country of residence. At that stage, she did not claim France as fiscal residence. When Revenu Québec undertook a verification of her situation, she completed a residency questionnaire in which she again did not disclose the Paris apartment as an “address outside Québec,” instead listing only her Chinese lodging, even though she frequently stayed at the Paris apartment with her fiancé. Throughout that verification, she advanced the thesis that she was a non-resident of Québec because she was resident in China; the French link was not yet put forward as the fiscal anchor.
In written responses during the verification, she stated that she did not “plan” to return to Québec because her “employment is still in China,” and that after her assignment ended, her plans and intentions would depend on available employment opportunities or projects. She added that she was considering retiring in France to join her future spouse, but did not present this as a fixed, imminent decision. The Court later interprets this as showing that her career and Radio-Canada’s decisions about postings or national assignments remained central in her mind; retirement in France was treated as a possibility rather than a concrete, scheduled transition.
Only at the objection stage, after assessments had issued, did she formally change theory and tell Revenu Québec that her true residence during the relevant period was France, not China or Québec. This shift in position—China as declared residence in returns, then France as asserted residence in opposition, all while she maintained strong Québec ties—became a key evidentiary and credibility issue for the Court.

Positions of the parties and assessed amounts
Revenu Québec concluded that Ms. Béraud had not severed her residential ties with Québec and issued assessments (cotisations) treating her as a Québec resident for the taxation years 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2021 (limited to January 2021). The 2017 assessment was later renounced on prescription grounds, but the others remained in dispute. The total amount claimed under the remaining assessments was 112,340.12 $, representing tax and related sums, not court-awarded damages. Ms. Béraud contested those assessments before the Cour du Québec under article 93.1.10 of the Loi sur l’administration fiscale, arguing that during the relevant period she was not a Québec resident but a resident of France, by virtue of her marriage (or impending marriage), repeated stays and long-term plan to retire there. She did not contest the quantum of the assessed amounts or the penalty for late filing in 2021, challenging only the underlying conclusion that she was a Québec resident.

Legal framework on tax residence
The Court began by reviewing the statutory basis for Québec income tax residence. Article 22 of the Loi sur les impôts imposes Québec income tax on any individual “résidant au Québec” on the last day of the taxation year, while article 10 extends the concept to persons who “résidaient ordinairement au Québec.” The statute does not define “residence,” so the Court turned to case law, including the Supreme Court of Canada’s seminal decision in Thomson v. Minister of National Revenue, which describes residence as the degree to which a person in mind and in fact settles into, maintains, or centralizes their ordinary mode of living, with its social and practical accessories, in a given place. Québec case law has long held that a person can have more than one fiscal residence and that the analysis focuses not on whether a foreign residence has been created but on whether sufficient ties with Québec remain to sustain residence there.
From this jurisprudence, the Court recited a non-exhaustive list of factors: civil status and habitual lifestyle; reasons, length and nature of absences from Québec; strength and continuity of ties to Québec versus the foreign jurisdiction (home, spouse, dependants, property, banking, licences, public insurance, social and cultural universe); self-declared residence in forms and returns; the pattern and regularity of presence in Québec; and whether there is a clear, planned return to Québec or a definitive break in ties. The Court stressed that these are qualitative guides, not a rigid checklist, and that residence is distinguished from merely temporary or intermittent presence by its constancy and durability.

Presumption of validity and burden of proof
Under article 1014 of the Loi sur les impôts, the factual assumptions underpinning tax assessments benefit from a presumption of validity. In practice, this means that the taxpayer must first “demolish” the assumptions with a prima facie evidentiary showing; only then does the burden shift back to the tax authority to prove the assessments on a balance of probabilities. The Court therefore examined whether Ms. Béraud’s evidence of her life in France and China, her relationships, travel pattern and financial affairs was sufficient to displace that presumption and show that Québec was no longer a place of ordinary residence.

Assessment of the condominium in Montréal and Québec life pattern
A decisive element in the Court’s analysis was the Montréal condo and how it fit into Ms. Béraud’s overall modus vivendi. While she presented the unit as a kind of “revolving door” space mostly used by relatives and friends when they were passing through Montréal, the Court found that she had systematically preserved it as a fully functional, continuously available personal base. It remained fully furnished, with ongoing subscriptions to cable, internet and telephone; she did not rent it out long-term, despite being perfectly comfortable renting the Gatineau condo for many years; and she actively participated in the condominium’s co-ownership governance, attending or arranging to be represented at meetings and keeping herself involved in decisions.
The Court drew a sharp contrast between the Montréal unit and the Gatineau condo. The latter was held and managed as a rental property and eventually sold when long-distance management became burdensome and real-estate prices were favourable. The Montréal condo, by contrast, was not monetized or disposed of, despite the costs of ownership and her prolonged foreign postings. The Court inferred that she regarded the Montréal unit as a necessary and permanent element of her life—an anchor to which she expected to return, especially given that her career path could at any time bring her back to a domestic assignment in Montréal.
Use of the condo during yearly returns to Québec for the correspondents’ week and family visits, and its consistent function as her point of arrival and stay, reinforced this view. Even when she was abroad, the presence of relatives in the condo was seen as an indicator of continuing interest and oversight: they helped her monitor and protect the property, which is not consistent with indifference or abandonment of Québec as a place of residence.

Treatment of the Paris apartment and French ties
The Court acknowledged that the Paris apartment and Ms. Béraud’s relationship with Mr. Phélip were very important in her personal life: she stayed there whenever she could, financed renovations across multiple years, used it as her base in Europe, and had a longstanding intention to retire in France with her spouse. However, several features undermined the claim that France had replaced Québec as her fiscal residence.
First, she never disclosed the Paris apartment in her initial residency questionnaire to Revenu Québec, despite the form’s clear instruction to report foreign addresses even when accommodation is provided free of charge. This omission was described as perplexing and revealing; if she truly regarded Paris as her fiscal residence, it was against her interest not to mention it when the tax authority was scrutinizing her ties. Second, when she bought the Montréal condo in 2014, her relationship with Mr. Phélip and involvement in Paris renovations were already well established. She did not explain why, if Paris was already intended as a permanent home, it was necessary to purchase rather than simply rent an apartment in Montréal. Third, she never sought any formal administrative status in France—no French health coverage, no driver’s licence, no income tax filings there, no citizenship application after marriage—so her claimed French residence rested on de facto living arrangements rather than institutional integration.
The Court also treated certain practical habits—such as mail forwarding from Montréal to Paris and online clothing orders delivered to Paris—as matters of convenience rather than legal indicators of a change in fiscal residence. Crucially, many of those purchases were paid with Québec credit cards for which the Montréal condo remained the billing address, reinforcing the enduring centrality of that address in her financial life.

Analysis of time spent, postings and travel pattern
On the question of days spent in each jurisdiction, the Court cautioned against purely quantitative reasoning. While Ms. Béraud emphasized that she spent far fewer days in Québec than in France or China, the Court noted that she herself did not claim Chinese residence despite spending the most time there. This demonstrated that physical presence alone could not be decisive. Instead, the Court focused on the reasons for presence and absence, the recurrence of returns to Québec, and the underlying work reality that Québec remained the base of her employer and the default place to which she could be reassigned.
Regular, even if brief, returns to Québec for professional and family reasons, always using the Montréal condo, revealed a recurring pattern of life that, taken with the other ties, was indicative of ordinary residence. For January 2021 in particular, the Court found it inconsistent that she argued she was not a Québec resident while simultaneously acknowledging that, as from February 2021, she was clearly resident in Québec, despite still travelling abroad from time to time as a special correspondent.

Inconsistencies and credibility findings
The Court identified two main inconsistencies that significantly weakened Ms. Béraud’s position. First, her decision to declare herself a resident of Québec from February 2021 onwards sat uneasily with her claim that her marital and social life in France already made her a French resident during the contested period. Nothing material had changed in her relationship or in the Paris apartment between 2018–2019 and 2021 and beyond, yet her declared tax status shifted back to Québec residence. The explanation suggested by counsel—that Radio-Canada required her to declare Québec residence once she was mostly working from there—was not supported by evidence and was viewed as implausible.
Second, for 2017–2019 she had formally declared China, not France, as her country of residence in her amended Québec filings, even after receiving professional advice on how to correct her status as a non-resident of Québec. That choice was inconsistent with her later assertion that she had always regarded France as her true residence, and she provided no convincing explanation for it. The Court held that she could perfectly well have filed in China as required by her employer while still declaring France as a place of residence to Revenu Québec; nothing compelled her to choose China. These shifts—from Québec to China and finally to France—raised doubts about the reliability of her narrative.

Outcome on tax residence and assessments
Synthesizing all factors, the Court concluded that Ms. Béraud had not severed her Québec residential ties during the period from 2017 through January 2021. The Montréal condo, her continued employment and professional anchor in Montréal, regular returns to Québec, use of Québec financial and administrative infrastructure, and her own post-2021 declaration of Québec residence all pointed to a continuing ordinary residence in Québec. The Paris apartment and her relationship in France were found to be very significant, but they did not displace Québec as a place of fiscal residence; instead, they showed that she had multiple centres of life, which the jurisprudence recognizes as compatible with maintaining Québec residence.
Accordingly, she failed to rebut the presumption of validity attached to Revenu Québec’s assessments. In any event, even if the presumption were considered neutralized, the Court found that Revenu Québec had affirmatively proven, on a balance of probabilities, that she was a Québec resident for the years 2018 and 2019 and for January 2021, and that she was therefore subject to Québec income tax on that basis. The 2017 year remained out of play due to prescription and Revenu Québec’s renunciation of that assessment.

Interpretation of article 93.1.18 LAF and court costs
Beyond residence, the case also raised a procedural point about costs. Ms. Béraud argued that article 93.1.18 of the Loi sur l’administration fiscale, which states that the Court cannot impose on an individual “aucuns frais additionnels” beyond those paid on filing, operated as a derogation from the general rule of costs in the Code de procédure civile and barred the Court from ordering her to pay Revenu Québec’s legal costs if she lost. Revenu Québec contended that the provision dealt only with court filing fees and did not displace the ordinary costs regime.
The Court undertook a detailed interpretive exercise, examining the wording of article 93.1.18 in its legislative context, its relationship to article 93.1.25 LAF and the general reference to civil procedure rules in article 93.1.19 LAF, as well as the legislative history and debates. Reading the provision alongside article 93.1.25, the Court held that “frais” in this context refers specifically to the fixed fees payable to the clerk on filing a contestation and that the phrase “aucuns frais additionnels” simply means that the clerk (as an officer of the Court) cannot demand other filing-type fees beyond those set by regulation. It does not purport to limit the Court’s power to award legal costs (frais de justice) at the end of the case.
The Court also noted that in the small claims tax contestation regime, the statute expressly and clearly refers to “condamnation aux frais,” including witness and expert expenses, when it intends to regulate legal costs. The absence of similar language in the ordinary tax contestation chapter, combined with the general deference to the Code de procédure civile, reinforced the conclusion that article 93.1.18 LAF does not derogate from the usual costs rules.

Final ruling and financial consequences
On the merits, the Court dismissed Ms. Béraud’s appeal and confirmed that she was a Québec resident for tax purposes during the disputed period (2018, 2019 and January 2021). As a result, the assessments issued by Agence du revenu du Québec for those years, totalling 112,340.12 $, remain fully in force against her, aside from the prescribed 2017 year. In addition, the Court rejected her argument on costs and held that article 93.1.18 LAF does not shield individuals from an adverse costs order in such tax appeals. The judgment therefore expressly dismisses her contestation “avec frais de justice,” making Agence du revenu du Québec the successful party. The decision does not quantify the precise dollar amount of those legal costs, which are to be determined under the applicable tariff and procedural rules; accordingly, while the principal tax assessments upheld amount to 112,340.12 $, the exact total of court-awarded costs in favour of Agence du revenu du Québec cannot be determined from the judgment itself.