Uncover the 'Wild West' of Canadian benefits and learn how to avoid costly compliance pitfalls in your pension and compensation planning.
Pensions and employee benefit arrangements offer significant tax advantages—but also carry complex rules where small missteps can trigger major tax consequences. This 1-hour webinar highlights the most common tax traps across pension plans, benefit plans, and trust structures, including RPPs, RRSPs, RCAs, EBPs, and employee life and health trusts (ELHTs). It focuses on how classification, funding, and drafting choices can unexpectedly bring arrangements within anti-avoidance regimes such as salary deferral arrangement (SDA) rules or constructive receipt principles.
The session also examines key compliance and planning risks in benefit trusts, including ELHT qualification requirements and CRA positions on designated employee benefits, alongside a practical case study on securing retiree benefits without creating adverse tax exposure. Attendees will gain clear, practical guidance on structuring and maintaining pension and benefit arrangements to avoid reassessment, penalties, and unintended tax outcomes.
By the end of this course, you will be able to:
Principal | Théroux law firm
Marcel Théroux is a lawyer with more than 40 years of experience in tax, pension, employment, and executive compensation matters. He is the Principal of Théroux Law Firm, a position he has held since 2017, following nearly two decades as a Partner at Mercer Canada, where he founded and led the firm’s Canada Law and Tax Practice in support of its retirement, investment, executive compensation, and group benefits businesses. Earlier in his career, Marcel served as Legal Counsel at Cassels Brock & Blackwell LLP, was a tax partner at Price Waterhouse, and worked as Tax Counsel with the Department of Justice, where he led a pension reform project and drafted tax legislation. Throughout his career, he has advised on income taxation, deferred income and pension plans, offshore tax planning, mergers and acquisitions, employment law, human rights, insurance arrangements, and legislative drafting.
Provincial regulators of CPAs in Canada do not require that independent providers of CPD be approved to offer courses. Instead, individual CPAs are responsible for assessing whether a CPD activity meets their requirements, and may take activities from any source provided those requirements are met.
Every course offered on LearnFormula is delivered by a qualified subject matter expert or learning organization, and advances learning objectives that are relevant to the responsibilities or professional competencies of Canadian CPAs. All activities on LearnFormula are quantifiable in terms of hours, and are also verifiable, in that users receive documented evidence of their attendance via a certificate of completion after finishing a course (and this certificate is stored by LearnFormula indefinitely). Nearly 100,000 Canadian CPAs successfully satisfy their CPD requirements via LearnFormula on an annual basis.
