A Tax Policy Legacy: Tim Edgar’s Contributions to Tax Scholarship and Tax Legislation

Tim Edgar’s passing in December 2016 dealt a severe blow to tax scholarship in Canada and globally, not to mention being a sad loss for this journal, to which he was a contributor for over three decades. Tim’s books, journal articles, and book chapters spanned a wide spectrum of tax policy issues and have played a central role in helping policy makers, academics, and students understand some of the most conceptually and technically difficult areas of tax law. Tim’s book on the taxation of financial arrangements, published by the Canadian Tax Foundation, is viewed by policy makers worldwide as the definitive authority on the subject, setting out a principled path to carving out the debt component of financial instruments and subjecting it to neutral accrual taxation. In a closely related area, his detailed analysis of the difficulties confronting policy makers who seek a neutral application of the goods and services tax (GST ) to financial supplies is considered to be foundational work in the field, and his proposal to remove the tax from business-to-business supplies has been adopted directly in New Zealand and via an indirect mechanism in Singapore. Tim’s work on the general anti-avoidance rule is cited time and again as a key treatment of the topic, while his proposal to extend thin capitalization rules to outbound investment has been adopted in Australia. Tim’s comprehensive analysis of the Canadian pseudo-imputation system opens the door to a much-needed reconsideration of the system. The more challenging the subject matter, the deeper Tim investigated and methodically dissected the topic to arrive at reasoned recommendations for reform. Tim’s work will continue to be read, cited, and applied in practice for many years.