http://decision.tcc-cci.gc.ca/tcc-cci/decisions/en/item/73378/index.do 
1057513 Ontario Inc. v. The Queen (September 12, 2014 – 2014 TCC 272) was a case involving a late-filed application for a dividend refund under Part IV of the Income Tax Act:
[4] There are no facts in dispute and counsel are to be commended for their submitted agreed statement of facts. For 8 taxation years from 1997 to 2004 inclusive, the Appellant declared and paid dividends to its shareholders totalling $4,676,600. Through a mistake of law (the Appellant’s director and officer was simply unaware of this specific and distinct legal obligation of a personal holding company), the Appellant failed to file any relevant corporate tax returns until 2008. There is no dispute that the filing of the returns in 2008 is beyond the 3 year period described in subsection 129(1). Upon receipt of the returns, the Minister assessed Part IV dividend tax, interest and penalties now in excess of $2,000,780, but at the same time denied the dividend refund. The amount of the dividend refund for taxation year 2003 is conceded by Respondent’s counsel to be $1,442,760, the sum of $46,740 less than that originally assessed. Otherwise there is no dispute as to the quantum of the reassessment, but only the entitlement to the dividend refund.
[5] Therefore, although the original dividend income paid by the Appellant to various shareholders originated from a connected corporation, the parties agree upon the sole issue for this Court to determine: whether the failure to file corporate tax returns within the 3 years described in subsection 129(1) (the “filing deadline”) is fatal to the Appellant’s present claim for repayment of the corporate dividend tax?
Under this very difficult set of facts counsel for the appellant came up with three very ingenious arguments:
[6] In summary, within subsection 129(1), the Appellant submits that:
a) the wording surrounding the filing deadline, as a condition precedent to payment of the dividend tax refund, is ambiguous (or at least “not unambiguous”) for several reasons: its unique use of the word “where” in the preamble, the absence of any enumerated penalty for missing the filing deadline and the filing deadline’s fundamentally different meaning and context from other conditions precedent in the subsection;
b) a proper textual, contextual and purposive analysis, not previously undertaken in other cases which have considered the subsection, would lay bare the ambiguities within the text resulting in a conclusion that the purpose of integration, to which the dividend tax refund is essential, is disharmoniously defeated by such a literal requirement by the Minister for compliance with the filing deadline; and,
c) apart from the approach to be taken above, the filing deadline, as a time limit, is directory and not mandatory and non-compliance is not fatal to entitlement to the dividend refund.
In a highly detailed analysis the court concluded that subsection 129(1) was not ambiguous, either on its face or after a textual, contextual and purposive analysis.
In addition the court rejected the argument that the time limit in the provision was merely directory and not mandatory:
[30] This timely and time sensitive requirement to file is embedded throughout the Act. Parliament certainly intended that much. Logically, failing to do so gives rise to various sanctions: penalties, interest, alternative assessments, denial of tax refunds, and in this case, dividend refund forfeitures. It may be unfair, unilateral and even draconian, but its central and overarching context and purpose is the requirement to file the prescribed “income tax return” for a prescribed “tax year” within a “filing deadline” established under the “Income Tax Act”. Little, if anything, is procedural, out of context or counter-purposive concerning that sine qua non within the Act. Such a central obligation limits the interpretive licence to allow an associated and fundamental time-frame from becoming merely directory. No authorities cited by the Appellant suggest that a prescribed filing deadline and the logical consequence for failure to file an income tax return are directory or even close. By “attending to the whole scope of the statute to be construed” one determines whether a time sensitive requirement is mandatory or directive: Senger-Hammond v. R., [1997] 1 CTC 2728 (TCC) at paragraph 25). A time deadline related to the filing of tax returns, as compared to other procedural and technical provisions within the Act and certainly the requirement for written receipts in Senger-Hammond, is considerably more important per se and also in general to the object intended to be secured by the Act in toto. In contrast, to read the preamble as directory simply renders the inclusion of the filing deadline related to such a fundamental obligation void, meaningless and contrary to the “whole scope of the statute” as a functional whole.
In the result the appeal was allowed but only to implement an agreed reduction in Part IV tax for 2003. Costs were awarded to the Crown in accordance with the Tariff but the parties were given thirty days to make submissions on costs of they disagreed with that result.