Gad Saad says he is leaving Quebec and Canada, and the first thing he learned after a difficult meeting with his accountant was how much the move would cost him in tax. He posted Thursday night on X that the bill tied to his departure left him “genuinely numb” and “speechless,” and said no person in a free society should have hard-earned money “stolen in this manner.”
That is the detail drawing readers in now: Saad is not talking about an abstract policy dispute. He says the combination of rising antisemitism and Canada’s rules for people who stop being residents is forcing him to think about leaving, and he says the country has become unsafe for his family as Jewish Canadians. He also said the tax system makes it nearly impossible to save enough to retire, which is why the departure bill landed so hard.
Saad is a professor of marketing at Concordia University and the author of Suicidal Empathy. His comments put a public face on a rule many people know only by name. An exit tax, also called a departure tax, applies when a person becomes a non-resident of Canada and is treated under the Income Tax Act as a deemed disposition, meaning certain assets are considered sold for tax purposes even if nothing was actually sold.
That point matters because the levy is not a simple fee for crossing a border. In practice, it can reach the unrealized capital gains on assets that fall under the deemed-disposition rule, which is why the amount can feel so large when someone first learns of it. Saad did not say in public how much he has been told to pay, only that an accountant laid out the cost after he met with them Thursday night.
There is also a fight over language. David Rotfleisch said the exit tax is “a bit of a misnomer” and called the concept a legal fiction. He said it is payable when a person becomes a non-resident of Canada and that it works through one of the deemed dispositions under the Income Tax Act. “It’s not an actual disposition, but the Tax Act says you have disposed of something,” he said.
Rotfleisch added that the most common deemed disposition affects everyone on death, when assets are treated as having been disposed of and the CRA collects tax on the accrued capital gain. The exit tax, he said, is simply another deemed disposition, this time on departure. Saad, by contrast, described the charge as money being taken from him as he prepares to leave.
What remains unanswered is the figure that will follow him out the door. Saad has said he is leaving because of rising antisemitism, but he has not said when he will go or how much the tax bill will ultimately be.
