Sometime during the month of February, millions of Canadians will receive mail from the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA). That mail, a “Tax Instalment Reminder”, will set out the amount of instalment payments of income tax to be paid by the recipient taxpayer by March 15 and June 15 of this year.

One of the biggest pandemic-related changes in the day-to-day lives of Canadians was the abrupt change to work-from-home arrangements. While such arrangements aren’t new — employees and the self-employed have been working from home for decades, ever since the available technology made such arrangements feasible — what changed in 2020 was the sheer number of Canadians who were working from home for the first time.

Under Canadian tax law, the general rule is that all amounts paid by an employer to his or her employees are treated as taxable income. That rule holds whether those amounts are paid as cash remuneration, or in the form of non-cash benefits.