Guy Lafleur, who passed away in 2022, was my childhood hero. Watching the Flower fly down the wing for the Montreal Canadiens — that mane of blond hair, the goals that made you leap off the couch — was as close to magic as a kid in Alberta could get. Rest easy, No. 10.
He was also a chainsmoker who liked his Molson and was famously indifferent to summer training. His long-time coach, Scotty Bowman, said he smoked between periods. None of it seemed to matter.
You could not get away with that today. Connor McDavid does not show up to training camp to “get into shape.” He shows up to demonstrate he is in shape. Camp is a checkpoint, not a starting line. The veteran who treats September the way Lafleur did gets cut or gets exposed by a youngster who spent his summer with a skating coach. The game changed.
Most Canadians did not get the same memo when it comes to their tax affairs and financial literacy .
Personal tax season just ended without much drama for the first time in four years. No underused housing tax mess, bare trust debacle or capital gains inclusion rate reversal mid-season. Canada Revenue Agency call wait times were merely terrible instead of historically awful. Practitioners did not need group therapy.
By recent standards, this was a quiet April, but that should not be confused with healthy. The past three tax seasons were chaos because of politically driven tax policy .
The structural problems beneath it are too few qualified practitioners chasing an impossibly complex Income Tax Act . Anyone can hang a shingle and call themselves an accountant in Canada, which leaves the public confused as to who is genuinely qualified to help them. The United Kingdom, Ireland and Australia all have a chartered tax adviser designation . Canada does not.
Combine that with a public that does not meaningfully engage in their tax affairs until late April and we are exactly where we were a year ago, even without the political chaos.
But the demand side is what Canadians can do something about today.
Most Canadians treat April 30 the way old-time hockey players treated training camp. They show up out of shape, dump an actual or virtual shoebox of receipts on an accountant’s desk and hope for the best. Their measure of success is the refund cheque. If money comes back, the year was a win. If they owe money, it’s a loss.
That is terrible financial planning and literacy. A refund means you gave the government an interest-free loan for up to 16 months. It is not a gift; it is your money returned late. The size of your refund tells you nothing about whether you optimized your tax position, only how badly your withholdings or instalments were calibrated.
What does year-round tax thinking actually look like? For salaried employees, it is more straightforward than most realize.
It means contributing to your registered retirement savings plan (RRSP) and tax-free savings account (TFSA) on a deliberate schedule rather than in a February panic. It means understanding which workplace benefits are taxable . It means keeping receipts for medical expenses, charitable donations and employment expenses as the year unfolds, not reconstructing them in April from credit-card statements. It means asking before accepting a raise that pushes you into a new bracket, whether a pension contribution or spousal RRSP makes sense.
None of this requires expertise. It requires attention.
For business owners, the stakes are higher and so is the work.
It means deciding in June whether to lease or buy that new piece of equipment because the answer affects your tax bill. It means asking your advisers, before you sign the paperwork, how to hold your operating company shares (personally or through other options) because the wrong choice can cost you the lifetime capital gains exemption when you sell.
It also means understanding that paying your teenager a dividend without thinking about tax on split income rules will likely have them taxed at the highest marginal rate. It means knowing what the tax issues are on your death so your estate is not left in a mess for your heirs.
The principle is the same in both cases: tax is a year-round discipline, not an April emergency. Find a practitioner who treats it the same way. Good advice is a great investment .
Tax has a greater material impact on your net worth and retirement than anything else you’ll encounter. Yet most do not understand how their own paycheque is calculated, nor whether new policies are sound or simply well-marketed. That ignorance has a personal financial cost, but also a political one.
A financially illiterate electorate makes emotional, propaganda-driven decisions at the ballot box. It rewards governments that hand out narrow, temporary baubles — a GST holiday here, a one-time cheque there — and punishes those who attempt anything structural. It cannot tell the difference between a tax cut and a gimmick or between fiscal discipline and a coupon book .
Canada will not get real and much-needed tax reform until enough Canadians are financially literate enough to demand it.
Your tax season started Jan. 1, 2026. It didn’t end on April 30. May 1 may be the start of the off-season, but that’s when the real work happens.
Although the Flower played in an era where he could get away with his cigarettes and his Molsons, the game has changed. The Income Tax Act has changed, too, and not in a good way. It is much more complex than eras past so you’ve got some serious tax and financial literacy training to do.
Kim Moody, FCPA, FCA, TEP, is the founder of Moodys Tax/Moodys Private Client, a former chair of the Canadian Tax Foundation, former chair of the Society of Estate Practitioners (Canada) and has held many other leadership positions in the Canadian tax community. He can be reached at kgcm@kimgcmoody.com and his LinkedIn profile is https://www.linkedin.com/in/kimgcmoody.
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