Participants will advance from fundamentals to complex trust planning and risk management, focusing on attribution issues, TOSI, the 21-year rule, testamentary and spousal trust planning, and post-mortem strategies. Participants will analyze real-world structures to identify traps, optimize designs, and “audit-proof” files through stronger documentation and process controls.

• Practitioners with foundational trust-tax knowledge who want deeper, planning-oriented skills. 
• Advisors seeking to identify sophisticated trust opportunities and avoid common advanced-level tax traps.  

By the end of this course, participants should be able to: 

• Evaluate non-tax and tax-driven reasons for using trusts and articulate their implications for structure and governance. 
• Diagnose high-risk areas (e.g., reversionary trust rule, attribution rules, TOSI, inadvertent association) and propose practical mitigations. 
• Design and assess advanced planning strategies, including income/capital-gains splitting, estate freezes, and use of successive or qualified trusts. 
• Apply the 21-year rule and related rollout/variation strategies, and address timing and compliance considerations. 
• Strengthen audit readiness by aligning documentation, elections, and working papers with CRA review patterns.  

Topics include: 

• Non-tax purposes and foundational design choices for advanced trust use. 
• Tax traps and guardrails: reversionary trust rule, attribution (including corporate attribution), TOSI interactions, inadvertent association. 
• Advanced planning: income/capital-gains splitting, trust as shareholder, testamentary vs. inter vivos levers, and estate-freeze variants. 
• Estate planning: spousal/alter-ego/joint-spousal, qualified disability trusts, charitable remainder and lifetime-benefit trusts, principal residence considerations. 
• Determining trust income: characterizing receipts/outlays (e.g., dividends, capital dividends, trustee/legal/accounting fees). 
• The 21-year rule: deemed dispositions, exceptions/elections, rollouts, trust variations, and corporate-freeze strategies. 
• Post-mortem planning: loss-utilization and double-tax mitigation approaches (e.g., pipeline, bump, 164(6) election) and filing touchpoints. 
• Audit-proofing: documentation, minute books, beneficiary designations, related-party transactions, engagement letters, and audit-process management. 

Course Content Created: October 2025

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About This Product

On-Demand Courses by CPA PRO are either video recordings from live seminars, or video recordings produced specifically for the on-demand audience. Where available, accompanying materials such as handouts or course notes are included.On-demand courses are eligible for verifiable CPD hours upon successful completion, and a certificate will be made available for download for your records.

Note that some courses comprise both formal instruction and self-directed exercises. In such cases, participants must complete both components to claim full CPD hours, or must reduce their reported CPD hours accordingly.

Please note that not all on-demand courses include downloadable materials such as course notes or slides.

How to get started

After completing your purchase, go to mylms.bccpa.ca. Log in using your CPABC Online Services credentials. Click Go to Your Courses and Materials to access your Learning Center. Select your course title to begin.