An appeals court in Ottawa has affirmed the constitutionality of the way the Canadian government allows Canadian financial institutions to share the information of their U.S. account-holders with the authorities in the U.S., ending the latest round of a years-long battle by two U.S. born Canadian women who are known informally to their supporters as "Gwen and Kazia." 

A long-awaited appellate court hearing in a years-long challenge of Canada's Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act-implementation legislation is set to get underway today, in a hearing room in Canada's Federal Court of Appeal in Vancouver, British Columbia.

A long-awaited appellate court hearing in a years-long challenge of Canada's Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act-implementation legislation will take place on March 30, sources involved in the matter are reporting. 

American expatriate campaigners against the U.S. system of citizenship-based taxation, which enables the U.S. to tax Americans who live in other countries – often as tax-paying dual citizens of these other countries – are calling attention to a campaign by a New York State congressman who is calling for the U.S. to retaliate against a planned tax by Canada on American residents who own Canadian properties.

Focus Financial Partners, the NASDAQ-listed, New York-based partnership of independent, fiduciary wealth management firms that has been growing rapidly since it was founded in 2004, has said it is planning to borrow US$800 million to enable it to acquire more wealth management businesses, both within and outside of the U.S.

American expats and spokespeople for organizations representing them have been asking questions about the scale of U.S. expat data being forwarded to the U.S. under the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, after the latest Canadian Revenue Agency (CRA) report of such data revealed that around two thirds of the accounts sent actually fell below the US$50,000 FATCA reporting minimum threshold. 

Last year, while campaigning as the Canadian Conservative Party's candidate to unseat Justin Trudeau as prime minister, Andrew Scheer was revealed to have dual U.S./Canadian citizenship that he'd acquired as a result of his father having been born in the United States, but he insisted that he was in the process of renouncing it.

Seven months on, having failed to win the election and having announced plans to step aside as his party's leader, the Canada-born Scheer disclosed over the weekend that he's changed his mind, and has decided to keep that U.S. citizenship.

The U.S. State Department has said it is no longer processing renunciations of U.S. citizenship in two Canadian cities, sparking concerns among dual citizens in the country that this will result in longer waiting times to renounce as well as added costs, due to the travel that may now be needed to reach other renunciation-processing offices.

Independent tax professionals from across Canada and elsewhere will come together later this month in Toronto, at a two-day, CPD-accredited “U.S. Expat Tax Conference”.

In an appearance on a well-known Canadian radio talk show on Friday, Toronto lawyer John Richardson explained how U.S. regulations that require Canadian (and other non-U.S.) banks and financial institutions to report to the Internal Revenue Service on their American account holders work, and described them as "incredibly intrusive".