How long do appeals to the Tax Court take?
Some rough calculations from recent years
I don’t know of any public information about the average time that an appeal to the Tax Court of Canada takes.
So, I did a simplistic analysis to see if it aligned with my intuitions. I chose two measures.
Average time to decision - cases disposed of by trial in 2024
I selected the first 20 written decisions published in 2024, in each of the informal and general procedure, which disposed of an appeal on the merits.1
I then checked the Tax Court’s online docket for the date of the first entry in each file, and calculated the length of the case from start-to-finish. Here is my calculation of the average length:
Among these cases, Carter v. King, 2024 TCC 71 deserves an honourable mention as the fastest general procedure appeal, going from filing to written decision in 521 days. This was far ahead of the next fastest appeal, which finished in 986 days.
At the other extreme, the slowest case finished in 3,091 days, or approximately 8.5 years.
I note a couple of caveats with these averages:
The average length of 5.3 years for general procedure cases means many of these cases began before the pandemic. I think it is fair to assume the pandemic added meaningful delay to most of these cases.
These decisions only include cases with written reasons. Presumably, cases decided with oral reasons would be decided somewhat more quickly.
Average time to outcome - General procedure matters filed in 2021
Of course, cases with a written decision do not represent most Tax Court cases, since most cases settle without a trial.
To estimate the length of a more typical case, I reviewed the first 20 file numbers on the Tax Court of Canada docket from 2021 for general procedure matters.2 Of those files, 15 had reached an outcome either by a discontinuance or a consent to judgment, while 5 cases remained active. No case had gone to trial.
Of the 15 cases which were discontinued or resolved by consent to judgment, the average time from the first filing to an outcome was 869 days or 2.38 years.
Comment/disclaimer
This post is simply to share some rough calculations which people may find interesting. This post is not intended as a critique of counsel, parties, judges, or court staff; by and large, my experience has been that participants in the Tax Court work to move cases forward in a timely way.
I selected these cases using the Court's neutral citations, beginning with 2024 TCC 1. For reasons unknown to me, there does not appear to be a decision for each Tax Court neutral citation. For example, there is no decision with the citation "2024 TCC 15".
In doing this, I excluded self-represented litigants from the above sample, as I assume their experience would differ from represented parties. I also treated related appeals as a single case for purposes of calculating an average.