Tax Day Canadian Style

 We finished our tax returns a few weeks ago. Actually I should say Toni’s cousin Steve finished them for us. By another strange coincidence he is a Kansas City native who married a Toronto woman a few years ago, and he happens to not only be an accountant but he specializes in cross border accounting. Having him on board gave us complete confidence that everything was done right on the first go round and he saved us a couple of thousand dollars. On top of that his office is only a couple of blocks away from our apartment.

As you can see from the photos things were a little more involved this year. As long as you are a US citizen you are required to file regardless of where you live or work. We still have a good part of our income from US sources so returns were required for two states, one province, and two countries, and we had to pay in two currencies. That took most of a ream of paper.

There are a few differences from US filing here. There is no joint filing option. Husband and wife file separately but you can shift your incomes from one to the other for the best outcome. The filing date is slightly later, April 30th.

One thing that is unchanged is that it is still a little painful. Well, not really. The truth is that I am quite happy to pay taxes to both countries. I know there is waste but I feel confident that most of it is well spent.

Daniel Lanois at The Great Hall

A couple of weeks ago we attended the Daniel Lanois concert. You might not know his name but you probably at least know his production work. He put on a special concert to celebrate his induction into The Canadian Music Hall of Fame the day before. This was also a big deal because he grew up in nearby Hamilton and started his first studios there, actually working out of his parent's basement at first. His mother and other family were in the audience.

The concert was at The Great Hall. This was significant to us as Toni and I went to a concert there exactly thirty years ago and this was our first time back. The room had been totally reconfigured over the years. This particular show was in the round and the stage area simply was an old Oriental carpet in the middle of the floor jam packed with his equipment and Brian Blade's drum kit. There was also a small toy HO scale railroad track running around the drum kit. The train carried two video cameras. These were part of the documentation of the show. There were several other cameras set up along with one cameraman. All the film footage was edited into the videos below.

The show was set up in three segments. The first was Lanois as a DJ using his own tape loops and sounds with art films projected on two large screens. The second part was the concert itself with just Lanois on guitar and pedal steel and Blade on drums. For a few of the later songs he brought out a bass player but I didn't catch his name. The final part of the evening was a meet and greet and he just hung out until everyone had their face time and photos. It really felt like he was throwing a party at home for his selected friends. It was very intimate, almost like sitting around a campfire. You might be able to see that there were only a couple hundred people about three rows deep around the perimeter of his stage area.

You should view the videos at full screen as they are high quality.