Suppose you sign an agreement of purchase and sale to buy a new home. But the bank insists that you have a co-signor for the mortgage and put him or her on title. Your friend agrees to co-sign, not expecting to pay anything on the mortgage or to have any real interest in the new home. You move in. Can you still get the GST/HST new housing rebate? Yes.
Cases to date have said that, by adding someone to title for financing, who wasn’t moving in with you as an owner, you lost your right to the rebate. (See Goyer v. The Queen, 2010 TCC 511 and Davidson v The Queen, 2002 CarswellNat 479.) CRA relied on those cases here.
In this case, Mr. and Mrs. Rochefort signed an Agreement of Purchase and Sale with a builder for a new home. TD Bank agreed to give them mortgage financing but only if someone with better credit than Mrs. Rochefort took a title interest. So, at the last minute, Mr. Fontaine, a nephew, was registered as a 50% owner on title with Mr. Rochefort. CRA said Mr. Rochefort wasn’t allowed the rebate because Mrs. Rochefort didn’t get ownership with him.
Justice Miller made a somewhat technical analysis to find that Mr. Rochefort could have the rebate. First, he said the earlier cases didn’t apply because, in those cases, the co-signor for the loan had also signed the agreement of purchase and sale. The nephew had not signed the agreement here. So, he was not the “particular individual” for purposes of the GST rebate rules.
“[12] … Respondent’s counsel referred me to the cases of Davidson v R[1] and Goyer v R[2] as dispositive of the matter. With respect, I disagree. In Davidson, Justice McArthur found that an individual, Ms. Waterhouse, who became a joint tenant with Mr. Davidson but solely to financially help Mr. Davidson, who occupied the new home, was a particular individual along with Mr. Davidson, as she had signed the Agreement of Purchase and Sale. As such, she had to meet the subsection 254(2) of the Act requirements, which she did not. In the case before me, Mr. Fontaine was not a particular individual: the situation is simply different.”
Rather, due to a special rule in ETA s. 262(3), Mr. and Mrs. Rochefort, having signed the APS, were jointly the “particular individual”. So, the question was whether they both were owners, even though Mrs. Rochefort wasn’t on title. Justice Miller dismissed the nephew’s title interest as just a financing measure, without any true beneficial ownership. Mr. and Mrs. R were the real owners, he said. And so, they were entitled to the rebate.