Methodology v1.1 — the rules this site is written and computed under

Everything here is Canadian

Every page describes the Income Tax Act, the CRA’s published administrative positions, and Canadian jurisprudence. Nothing on this site describes another country’s tax law.

The surrounding query space is overwhelmingly American, so being read as US content is the likeliest way a claim from this site gets misapplied. The jurisdiction is in the kicker of every page, in the page title wherever the query carries it, and in the first lines of /llms.txt.

Three classes of source, each cited to its own authority

Statute is cited to the Justice Laws consolidation, judgments to CanLII, and the CRA’s administrative position to the income tax folio by paragraph number — never to a page, and never to a secondary summary of any of the three.

A paragraph number is what makes a claim checkable in the ten seconds a skimming accountant gives it, and it is the unit an answer engine can carry. Every link is fetched before merge; where a source refuses an automated request, it is confirmed by hand instead.

Every published figure comes from one engine

Every number on this site is computed by one engine, @acru/strategy-sim — the same engine the ledger runs — under a named, versioned assumption set that the page displays alongside the figure.

The marketing build reproduces the ledger’s pinned golden vectors in CI, so a forked or stale engine breaks the build rather than quietly publishing different arithmetic. Figures are server-rendered at build time, so the numbers a reader sees with JavaScript disabled are the numbers the engine produced.

A worked tax example is somebody else’s published example

Where a /tax/ page shows arithmetic, the arithmetic is reproduced from the cited source’s own worked example, with the citation attached. These pages carry no assumption set, because they ran no projection.

A number this site computed about a reader’s own position would be the pronouncement the guardrails below exist to prevent. Borrowing the source’s example keeps the illustration and the authority in the same place.

Every projection is priced against not doing it

A projection publishes its advantage net of a fair no-strategy baseline: the identical out-of-pocket outlay applied without borrowing, or the same mortgage amortised without the dam. The baseline definition is part of the assumption set.

A leverage projection that reports the portfolio and stops reports the market, not the strategy. Subtracting the debt still outstanding and what the same cash would have earned unlevered is what leaves a number worth acting on.

What is not modelled is listed, not omitted

Each assumption set enumerates the effects it deliberately leaves out. That list is published in full next to the figures, not summarised.

Fees, investment-income taxation along the way, rate changes over the horizon, and province-by-bracket tax detail all move the answer. A projection that quietly drops them looks more precise than it is.

The two dominant assumptions are re-run, and the range is published

Every projection is re-run low and high on the assumptions that dominate its outcome, and the resulting range ships with the base case rather than behind it.

The bands are part of the versioned assumption set, so widening or narrowing one is a version bump rather than an edit.

This site computes; it does not pronounce

Nothing here states a reader’s tax position, characterises a particular transaction, or gives financial, tax, or investment advice. The pages publish arithmetic under stated assumptions and summaries of published law, and say which they are doing.

The boundary is enforced in CI as a banned vocabulary over the whole surface, not as an editorial habit — the same list the product is held to. Every calculator and every /tax/ page renders the matching disclaimer without an author having to remember it.

Every page stamps what produced it

Every content page carries, in its footer, the team that wrote it, the team that reviewed it where one did, the date it was last updated, and the methodology version it was produced under. Tax and methodology pages additionally carry a citation block with a permanent URL.

All four come from the page’s own frontmatter, which the build validates, so a footer cannot claim a review that did not happen or a version that does not exist.

A URL does not change, and a correction is a version

Published URLs are permanent. Each release of this document keeps its own address, so a citation stays valid after the methodology moves on, and any change to the rules above is a version bump recorded in the changelog rather than a silent edit.

Correcting a figure or a citation on a page updates that page’s date. Changing how figures are produced, sourced, or bounded changes this document’s version, and every page produced afterwards stamps the new one.

The assumption sets this version publishes under

The one-engine rule above is only checkable if the assumption sets themselves are published, so they are — in full, rendered from the objects the engine computes with rather than restated in prose. Read the assumption sets in force, including the effects each one leaves out and the bands each projection is re-run at.

What this version does not cover

This document covers how this website is sourced, computed, and published. The platform’s tax-interpretation methodology — the rules that govern how the ledger attributes interest for a customer, and the counsel review behind them — is a separate document that is not published here. Nothing on this site reproduces it or states a position from it.

The rules this site is written and computed under