Executive Summary: Key Legal and Evidentiary Issues

• Central dispute over whether the City’s modification notice lacked the mandatory annex explaining Larsimo’s review rights and the 60-day deadline, preventing the delay from starting to run.
• Characterization of the evidence as “contradictory” between a municipal official’s description of standard mailing procedure and the property owner’s sworn statement about the actual envelope contents.
• Weight accorded to an unchallenged declaration under oath by the taxpayer’s president versus indirect, procedural testimony by the municipal analyst.
• Application of the appellate standard of review (palpable and overriding error) to the TAQ’s factual findings in a preliminary inadmissibility ruling.
• Interaction between strict, forfeiture-type statutory delays in municipal tax appeals and the requirement that municipalities strictly comply with notice-content regulations.
• Remittal of the case to the TAQ to determine whether the second procedural step—a late judicial application—can be rescued by force majeure, leaving the merits and any monetary impact unresolved.

Factual background

Larsimo inc. owns two immovable properties in Montréal. Municipal authorities issued an Avis de modification dated 30 November 2023 to adjust the 2023–2025 property assessment roll following construction work on the building. The notice was accompanied by a certificate from the City’s assessor. The president of Larsimo, Jean-Simon Larochelle, swore that when he received the envelope around 30 November 2023, it contained the modification notice and the assessor’s certificate but no additional informational document or annex explaining Larsimo’s right to request an administrative review, how to exercise that right, or how to calculate the applicable time limit. Under the Loi sur la fiscalité municipale (L.f.m.), a taxpayer normally has 60 days from the sending of the notice to file a Demande de révision administrative (DDR). Counting from 30 November 2023, that 60-day period would have expired on 29 January 2024. Larsimo’s lawyers at Dunton Rainville filed the DDR on 7 February 2024, nine days after that normal deadline. All parties acknowledged that, if the statutory delay had begun to run in the usual way, the DDR was filed late. After discussions between the parties failed to resolve the dispute, Larsimo’s counsel filed a Requête introductive d’instance before the Tribunal administratif du Québec (TAQ) on 1 August 2024. That second-stage judicial recourse was also late by three days, because the ultimate deadline was 29 July 2024. Again, the parties agreed on the relevant calendar.

Statutory and procedural framework

The L.f.m. structures municipal property tax disputes in two key stages. First, a taxpayer who wishes to challenge a property assessment or a modification notice must submit a DDR within 60 days, a delay described in the case law as strict and entailing forfeiture if missed. Provisions such as articles 132 and 134.1 L.f.m. govern the time limits and the narrow circumstances (including force majeure) under which late filings may be excused. For the second, judicialized stage, article 138.5 L.f.m. allows the TAQ to consider whether a late judicial recourse can be excused by force majeure, including when the delay results from counsel’s serious and unforeseeable fault rather than the taxpayer’s own negligence. Alongside the statute, the Règlement sur la forme et le contenu minimal de divers documents relatifs à la fiscalité municipale imposes detailed content requirements on notices sent by municipalities. Article 19 specifies that any notice of modification must indicate, among other things, the deadline for filing a review request, the amount of any required fee, and a reference to the relevant municipal regulation governing that amount. The L.f.m. itself (notably article 180, second paragraph) similarly requires that the notice mention the taxpayer’s right to seek review, explain how to calculate the period during which the right may be exercised, and describe how to exercise it. The Court emphasized that these are mandatory obligations: the notice “must contain” this information, and missing or incomplete information can prevent the statutory delay from starting to run at all. Jurisprudence such as the Court of Appeal’s decision in Ville de Lévis c. Collège de Lévis has held that when an assessment-related notice omits fundamental information on the way to exercise the remedy and on the applicable deadline, the notice is null and the delay for filing a challenge does not begin. On that basis, municipal authorities must strictly comply with the prescribed form and content before relying on strict, forfeiture-type delays against taxpayers.

Proceedings before the Tribunal administratif du Québec

Confronted with both the late DDR and the late judicial application, the City of Montréal filed a Requête en irrecevabilité before the TAQ, arguing that the TAQ lacked jurisdiction because of the successive procedural defaults. At a preliminary hearing on 26 September 2024, the TAQ was asked, as a threshold matter, whether Larsimo could invoke force majeure to excuse the late DDR and, by extension, whether the 60-day delay had even started if the notice was defective. Larsimo relied heavily on the sworn declaration of its president, Mr. Larochelle. In eight concise paragraphs, he stated that he personally received the envelope around 30 November 2023 and that it contained only the modification notice and the assessor’s certificate, with no annex or explanatory document describing his rights, procedures or deadlines for review. All counsel agreed to file this declaration as evidence instead of having Mr. Larochelle testify in person, and the TAQ explicitly noted that it would treat the declaration as his testimony. The City did not ask to postpone the hearing to cross-examine him. For its part, the City called Ms. Yanet Reyes Roque, an Analyste de recettes in the Direction des services administratifs et de l’informatique. She described her role in supervising the overall process by which modification notices, certificates and explanatory annexes are prepared and transmitted. She confirmed that another employee actually assembled the envelopes and mailed them and that she herself did not physically handle the specific envelope addressed to Larsimo. Her testimony supported the existence of a general presumption that the municipality follows the statutory and regulatory formalities and normally includes the required annexes. After hearing both sides, the TAQ concluded that it was confronted with contradictory evidence: on the one hand, the sworn declaration saying that no annex was present; on the other, the municipal official’s description of standard procedures, which the TAQ took as implying that the annex must have been enclosed. The TAQ found Ms. Reyes Roque’s evidence more complete, reliable and persuasive, treated it as proving that the annex was in fact sent to Larsimo, and held that the 60-day delay had begun to run as usual on 30 November 2023. Because the DDR then appeared clearly late and no force majeure was recognized at that stage, the TAQ held that Larsimo had failed to file a valid, timely DDR and declared itself without jurisdiction to entertain the late judicial application or the arguments about counsel’s alleged force majeure at the second step. It therefore granted the City’s preliminary motion and dismissed the case as inadmissible.

Appeal before the Court of Québec

Larsimo sought and obtained leave to appeal the TAQ’s decision to the Court of Québec. The appeal raised three main questions: the applicable standard of intervention, whether the TAQ committed a reviewable error in its assessment of Ms. Reyes Roque’s testimony, and whether it erred in rejecting or sidelining Mr. Larochelle’s sworn declaration. On the standard of review, the Court applied the well-established framework from Vavilov and Housen c. Nikolaisen, distinguishing questions of law (reviewed for correctness) from questions of fact or mixed fact and law (reviewed for palpable and overriding error). Because the central dispute concerned a concrete factual issue—whether the annex explaining the review rights was actually inside Larsimo’s envelope—the Court held that the applicable standard was the deferential “erreur manifeste et déterminante,” a “poutre dans l’œil” rather than an “aiguille dans une botte de foin.” The burden lay squarely on Larsimo to show such an error. Turning to the evidence, the Court accepted that the municipality benefits from a rebuttable presumption that it follows legal formalities when sending tax-related notices. The Court also accepted that Ms. Reyes Roque was a credible witness about the usual process. However, it stressed the limits of her evidence: she did not assemble the envelopes, did not mail them and could not testify directly about the specific contents of the envelope that went to Larsimo. Her testimony established only the normal procedure, not what was actually included in that one envelope. In contrast, Mr. Larochelle’s sworn declaration was the only direct, affirmative evidence on the precise contents of the envelope received by the taxpayer. The City had chosen, for its own strategic reasons, not to request his presence or to cross-examine him, and the TAQ itself had confirmed that it would treat the declaration as his testimony. In that procedural context, the City’s lawyer candidly acknowledged on appeal that, absent cross-examination or contrary direct evidence, the declaration’s allegations should have been treated as established. The Court further emphasized that a sworn declaration normally carries significant inherent reliability, given the solemn obligation to tell the truth and the potential penal consequences of perjury. Against that backdrop, the Court found that the TAQ had mischaracterized the evidentiary record by describing it as “contradictory” and by treating Ms. Reyes Roque’s limited, procedural testimony as proof of what was physically in the envelope. Properly understood, her evidence and Mr. Larochelle’s declaration did not truly conflict: one described the usual upstream process; the other described the specific downstream result in this particular case. They could coexist without contradiction, and only the declaration directly addressed the critical question. The TAQ’s conclusion that the annex had been sent to Larsimo, and that there was a genuine conflict of testimony resolved in the City’s favour, had no real support in the transcripts. This amounted to a palpable and overriding error in the appreciation of the evidence, especially given that the TAQ was ruling at the preliminary inadmissibility stage, where heightened prudence is required and dismissal should be reserved for clear, obvious cases. Once the unchallenged declaration was properly taken as true, the Court held that it was “probable,” at this preliminary stage, that the envelope sent to Larsimo exceptionally did not contain the explanatory annex that is usually enclosed. In line with Ville de Lévis c. Collège de Lévis and TAQ decisions like Société du Palais des Congrès de Montréal c. Ville de Montréal and Robert Wares c. Ville de Mont-Tremblant, the absence of a proper annex meant that the mandatory informational elements of the notice were missing. As a result, the 60-day delay for filing the DDR never began to run, and the DDR filed on 7 February 2024 could not be characterized as late. The TAQ therefore erred in finding the DDR out of time and in declaring itself without jurisdiction on that basis.

Outcome and implications

Having found a palpable and overriding error in the TAQ’s treatment of the evidence and its characterization of the annex issue, the Court of Québec partially allowed Larsimo’s appeal. It set aside the TAQ’s 30 October 2024 decision, rejected the City’s Requête en irrecevabilité as it related to the DDR, and held that the administrative review request must be treated as admissible because the statutory delay had not validly started. However, the Court did not resolve the second, separate timing issue: the three-day delay in filing the Requête introductive d’instance before the TAQ. Since the TAQ had previously declined jurisdiction to examine that second-stage delay, it had not made any factual findings or applied article 138.5 L.f.m. regarding possible force majeure arising from counsel’s conduct. The leave-to-appeal judgment had also not framed questions on that second issue. Respecting both the institutional role of the TAQ as primary fact-finder and the limited scope of the appeal authorization, the Court refused to decide the second-stage delay itself. Instead, it remitted the file to the TAQ so that the tribunal could exercise its jurisdiction and determine whether the late judicial application can be excused and, if so, proceed to hear the merits of the assessment dispute. On costs, the Court considered it appropriate, in light of the fragmentary nature of the outcome, to order that each party bear its own legal fees. In practical terms, the successful party in this appeal is Larsimo inc., which obtained the reversal of the TAQ’s inadmissibility ruling on the DDR and the reopening of its challenge before the TAQ. No monetary award, damages, or quantified costs were granted in its favour at this stage, and the total financial impact of the underlying property tax dispute cannot yet be determined.