Last reviewed 30 August 2026 · Checked against Budget 2025 and LEGISinfo · By the CryptoNorth Team
You will see the letters CARF all over this subject. It stands for the Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework, and underneath the name it is one simple idea:
A rule that would make crypto exchanges send the tax authority a yearly summary of what you bought and sold — roughly the way your bank already reports the interest it paid you.
Dozens of countries agreed to bring it in. Canada agreed too. Canada has just not switched it on yet, and that is the part most pages get wrong.
No — not yet. No Canadian exchange currently sends the CRA a report of your trades, because CARF is not in force here. Budget 2025 deferred it to 1 January 2027,[1] and the bill that would enact it — C-31 — passed second reading on 3 June 2026 and is still before the Standing Committee on Finance. It has not received royal assent.[2]
Practically: no Canadian exchange is filing CARF reports on you, and the return you file by 30 April 2027 for the 2026 tax year is not backed by CARF data. If you have read that reporting “began in January 2026”, that was the original proposed date. It moved.
Canada signed the international joint statement in 2023 along with dozens of other jurisdictions. That statement records an intention to implement in time to commence exchanges by 2027.[3] Canada is still inside that commitment — it simply moved its domestic start date to the later end of it.
Because for a lot of the world, it is. CARF is an international standard, and a number of jurisdictions legislated a start on 1 January 2026. Headlines written for a global audience are accurate for those countries and wrong for this one.
Canadian pages then repeat the global date. It is an easy error to make and most of the sites carrying it are not being careless — they are localising a true statement to the wrong country. But the consequence for a Canadian reader is a page that describes an obligation that does not exist here yet.
The CRA does not need CARF to obtain exchange records, and it has already done so. In March 2021 the Federal Court ordered Coinsquare to hand over customer identity and trading data covering accounts that held C$20,000 or more in any year from 2014 to 2020, plus the 16,500 largest accounts for each of those years.[4]
Your obligation to report has never depended on whether your exchange reports too. Crypto dispositions are taxable now, and were taxable before any of this.[5] CARF changes what the CRA is handed automatically. It does not change what you owe.
Date, CAD value, amount and fees for every transaction, held six years. When CARF does start, your figures and the exchange’s should agree — and if they do not, you want to be the one who can show why.
There is no T5-style crypto slip coming for the 2026 year. Nothing will arrive in the mail to prompt you.
The gap before automatic reporting starts is the cheapest time to correct an earlier return. The CRA’s Voluntary Disclosures Program exists for this; it is worth asking an accountant about before, not after, data starts flowing.
Whether CARF starts in 2027 or later changes nothing about the 2026 return you file next spring.
Plenty of pages will already tell you exactly which platforms must report, what data points they will send, what the penalties are and how self-certification will work. We are not going to, because C-31 is still at committee and a bill can change between second reading and royal assent.
What we can say is what the draft proposes and what the government has committed to: a 2027 start, with reporting flowing from there. When the bill is enacted we will write the detail against the enacted text rather than the draft, and this page will say so. The House returns on 21 September, so nothing will move before then.
This page is general information, not tax or legal advice, and we are not accountants. Bill C-31 is before Parliament and its provisions may change before enactment. Confirm current status directly against LEGISinfo and the CRA, and speak to a Canadian accountant about your own situation.