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Former Raptors coach suing Ontario over refusal to refund $700K foreign buyer tax
The Toronto Raptors’ NBA championship-winning coach Nick Nurse’s farewell gift from the province of Ontario was a $700,000 foreign buyer’s tax liability.
Nurse’s April 2023 departure from the Raptors was about as amicable as firings come, with the Raptors headlining their social media announcement of his termination as “forever grateful.” A few weeks later, the American coach penned his own note of thanks to “the city, the people, the country we’ve called home for the past 10 years” after landing a new gig as head coach of the Philadelphia 76ers, where he remains to this day.
But Ontario’s Ministry of Finance didn’t get the memo about the love-in, when it rejected Nurse’s application for a rebate of the $697,500 Non-Resident Speculation Tax he and his wife had previously paid on their $4.65-million Mississauga home.
After failing to convince the ministry to reconsider its disallowance of the rebate over the past two years, Nurse and his wife are now taking their fight to court.
“It’s been quite frustrating for them,” says Mike Collinge, the Toronto-based partner at Deloitte Legal Canada LLP who is acting for the Nurses. “The ministry, at the administrative level, is yet to really articulate a reasonable basis for their position.”
According to a notice of appeal filed last month with the Ontario Superior Court in Toronto, Nurse was employed with the Raptors on a foreign national work permit from the time he joined the team in 2013. In 2018, he was elevated to head coach, before delivering the Raptors’ first NBA championship the following year.
Nurse and his wife purchased the home at the heart of the tax case in October 2021, paying the $697,500 NRST levy on top of the $4.65-million sale price. The 15-per-cent rate then in force for homes sold to foreign buyers in the Greater Golden Horseshoe Region has since risen to 25 per cent.
Regulations in place at the time also allowed foreign buyers to claim a rebate for their NRST if they remained in the property as their principal residence for at least 60 days and worked in Ontario for at least a year, among other requirements.
After selling the property in September 2023, the couple applied for their rebate in March 2024, only to have it rejected a month later. Ontario’s Ministry of Finance confirmed the original disallowance in April of this year, explaining that the Nurses did not qualify because they did not live in the house up to the date when they applied for the rebate.
In their notice of appeal, Nurse and his wife said that they had sold the Mississauga house in a hurry so that they could buy a new home in Philadelphia, arguing that they “were not the type of real estate speculators the Legislature aimed to address” when it enacted the NRST. In addition, Nurse had brought “significant economic and social value to the province” during his decade with the Raptors, the notice reads.
More importantly, the Nurses say that the NRST regulations contained no mention of a continuing residency requirement at the time of their rebate application, but instead set a simple four-year deadline for applications, from the date of purchase.
The NRST regulations were tightened shortly after Nurse made his rebate application, barring foreign-buyer-tax refunds to anyone who does not become a permanent resident within four years of their purchase. Under the updated rebate rules, the Nurses would no longer be eligible, a fact Collinge believes factored into the ministry’s rejection.
“I think it’s a case where they changed the law after Mr. Nurse made his rebate application and then they’re reading a requirement into the law retroactively when the legislation itself was not retroactive,” Collinge says.
David Rotfleisch, a Toronto tax lawyer who is not involved in the case, was less diplomatic in his assessment of the Ministry of Finance’s decision-making.
“It sounds like an unfortunately common scenario where they’re acting as cowboys, making up the law as they go along,” Rotfleisch says. “Nothing is certain when it comes to court, but on the face of it, there seems to be no basis for the denial, so it should be a slam dunk for the taxpayer.”
According to Collinge, the hard-line approach in this case fits a broader trend in provincial taxation matters.
“The ministry at the administrative level — dealing with audits and objections — in my experience has become very aggressive in the last few years,” he says. “But in this case, we’re optimistic that counsel will see the light early on in the process.”
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