The appellant, a telecommunications company, filed GST returns claiming substantial tax refunds under the Excise Tax Act.
Following an audit, the Minister issued assessments disallowing input tax credits and imposing gross negligence penalties.
Rather than appealing to the Tax Court of Canada, the appellant brought an application for judicial review in Federal Court seeking declarations that the assessments breached procedural fairness, lacked an evidentiary foundation, and were issued for an improper purpose.
The Supreme Court of Canada unanimously dismissed the appeal, holding that the application was bereft of any possibility of success: the first two claims were properly within the Tax Court's exclusive jurisdiction as attacks on the correctness of assessments, the improper purpose claim was unsupported by any pleaded facts, and all three declarations sought would have had no practical effect given the absence of a live controversy apart from the correctness of the assessments.
