For years I moved a dart board that I picked up somewhere along the way in the hope of one day having the time to create the image I had in my mind about the seeming randomness of the GAAR. After a good 10 years of the dart board gathering dust, one winter weekend in January 2014, maybe it was having watched the decision in Copthorne Holdings, in any event, I embarked on the project, stripped down the dart board and painted the image you see. There were a number of things that I had learned over the years about the GAAR, including that there was no meaningful difference between misuse and abuse. That Canada Trustco explained where to find abusive tax avoidance. Plus that there were a whole lot of specific anti-avoidance rules the Income Tax Act to be considered before applying the GAAR. As I shared the image of the GAART Board with people, they all wanted one, which lead me to look to other ways that I could bring the GAART Board to the masses and create a few laughs along the way, out of something that really involves quite a serious matter for study. With the GAART Board hanging amidst the rest of our art collection, it was not long after explaining the GAAR to my son, that he pointed out to me that few people know how to score darts and even fewer must know what abusive tax planning is.
Prior or to the creation of this rather sophisticated version of the GAART Board, I had experimented with early methods of creating an image, I believe that this one was from about 1999. Since there were few cases out then, I was urged by a senior partner to not publish it at the time. It is interesting to see, how all the specific Anti-avoidance rules proliferated, and how the key ones depicted became the subject of future cases.
Early design of the GAART Board, c. 1999