Don DeWolfe CGA

Friday.

Christmas Eve eve.

6:00 a.m.

I’m en route my office.

First stop, the local Tim Horton’s.

I wheel into my short-cut – the loading dock driveway behind the little strip mall. There’s never any traffic along this 300 metre stretch, and it’s 1/3 the distance to the drive-through. Plus, if I hit the gas hard in second gear, I can get my wheels off the ground on some of the dips.

This morning I’m braking hard to make the turn into the drive-through entrance, when I meet another car. We get there about the same time, but the other car stops, so I zip in. I figure the other driver is being courteous – after all, it’s Christmas! They lay on their horn. Apparently I figured wrong.

I order, pull up, and check my mirror. An angry looking woman is driving the car. As she’s ordering I decide to teach her a lesson for using the horn.

I get to the dispensing window and pull out a $20 bill.

“Good morning,” I say to the woman who passes me my coffee. I hand her the twenty. “This is for me, and I’d like to pay for the order of the woman behind me.”

Coffee Girl looks momentarily puzzled. She points behind me. “Pay for her?”

“Yes.” That’ll teach her. “And, keep the change.”

Now Coffee Girl is even more puzzled. “But there will be a lot of it!”

“Merry Christmas,” I say, and hit the gas hard. There are more dips in front, but with a hot coffee in my hand, I dodge them and hustle to make my green light.

Okay, I’ll admit it – I’m a sentimental guy.

I carry around the cap badge I wore when I was an army cadet, 37 years ago.

And every Christmas, the cork from champagne given to us on our honeymoon 25 years ago finds a place on the tree.

And twice a week, I strap on the shoulder pads / chest protector I inherited from my Dad, when he stopped playing hockey.

At one time, the DeWolfe squad could fill the ice. Every Saturday morning me, my two brothers, my Dad, and my wife Kate laced up our skates and chased a puck around the rink. However, nothing lasts forever, and now it’s just Kate and me keeping the tradition alive.

Jamie was the first to go – he was only playing to get close to a girl he liked anyway. Then Al. He moved to the country and a ‘local’ game meant a grueling winter drive on dirt roads. Finally Dad gave it up. He got hit in the chest with a puck that broke a rib and punctured his lung.

Dad was wearing the ‘chest protector’ I now wear twice a week when that puck snapped his rib like a dry twig. This happened 20 years ago.

I put one plus one together…yesterday.

I prefer tea to coffee, but I have discovered the odds of getting a decent cup of tea in a restaurant are about zero. Between cheap tea bags, cream instead of milk, or water that isn’t hot enough, it’s just safer to order coffee and add lots of cream and sugar.

However, on this particular morning, as I joined 5 fellow accountants for our monthly breakfast meeting, I was feeling coffee-ed out. Plus, one of the guys had a nice china pot in front of him and a selection of premium teas. I decided to take a chance.

I gave the waitress my order and included a pot of tea, with milk.

Moments later she was back, proudly transporting a teapot. Now I knew she didn’t have time to get to the kitchen and back, and I couldn’t recall seeing any machinery in the little alcove she came out of for boiling water.

“Is that water boiling hot?” I asked.

“Oh yes, boiling hot,” she replied.

“Freshly boiled?” I pressed.

“Freshly boiled,” she confirmed.

“So if I stick my finger in there, it will scald the flesh right off the bone?” I asked. By now, conversation had stopped around the table.

“You sure will,” was the irritated answer.

I took the pot, removed the lid, and as my colleagues watched in horror, plunged my finger in – and left it there, staring the waitress in the eye.

“I shower in water hotter than this,” I told her, and passed the pot back. “No thanks.”

A couple minutes later I had a fresh pot of water that was too hot to hold, and a sometime after that, a small jug of milk.

And the waitress? She had a tip that would pay for the Globe and Mail – but not the weekend edition.

It’s evening, after a full day of tax courses at an accountant’s conference, and I’m nursing a club soda in an empty bar with 6 half-drunk accountants and a mid 20′s, semi-attractive bartender.

Sadly, this isn’t the pathetic part.

The pathetic part is watching those guys trying to pick up the bartender using…tax knowledge.

I leave when one guy, Tom, passes over a business card and says with a wink, “I can help you.”

I had to attend a funeral and was shopping for an appropriate tie to go with my black suit. Since I’m partially colour blind and have the fashion sense of a typical middle-aged accountant, I decided I better get help.

I gave my buddy Brian a call.

Brian’s a senior VP for a big commercial real estate company, always run off his feet, and a bit of a clothes horse. He took my call.

“Hey D. I’m just in a meeting. Is this important?” he asked.

“I’m buying a tie and wondered if I could go with black on black, or should I do a colour?” I said. “It’s for a funeral.”

“I gotta take this,” he told the people in the room, then stepped into the hall.

I went with a burgundy, no black on black.

I was refueling my riding mower on the dirt road by our farm when Tom, the cattle farmer across the way, pulled beside me in his battered pick-up truck.

“Everything okay?” he asked.

I assured him all was well and we fell into an easy conversation.

We discussed the work he was doing with his high-hoe in the back fields; chatted about the bull he had to put down; spoke about the new hydraulic piston that was a heavy bastard to install in his hay-bine; shook our heads over the Belleville Bulls’ latest draft pick, and, mused about how he could no longer drink all Friday night without paying for it Saturday.

Then we talked about kittens.

There were 2 litters of four kittens each that we knew about, and another one we hadn’t found yet. We discussed which kittens were cuter, and which ones would be good house cats, who the father was, which guys were feisty, and which ones were stupid and on track to become coyote bait.

When we were done Tom looked a little sheepish, mumbled something about the hay not cutting itself, and drove off in a cloud of dust.

I finished cutting the grass and went looking for the last litter.

Found them! Three more kittens. Cute ones, too.

Last night I went to the Valumart for groceries. The total came to $27.52.

I gave the girl at the cash two $10 bills; one $5 bill; two loonies, two quarters; and, two pennies.

When I was done she stared at the change in her hand as if I had just filled it with gummy worms and rusty nails. Finally she said, “I’m not very good with change.”

“Aren’t you in kind of the wrong job then?” I asked.

Then she stared at me like I was made of gummy worms and rusty nails. So I took my groceries and left. Probably she is still there, staring at her hand.

Spring 2009 and it’s my 19th year of earning my living as an accountant. I’m at Mom’s place, going over her tax stuff.

“And I’ll need your receipts for any repairs or renovations to the cottage for the Home Renovation Tax Credit,” I say.

“Oh, we can’t claim that,” Mom replies.

“Really? Because I’m pretty sure you can.”

“Oh no, Dear. We can’t.” Mom says with conviction.

“Why do you think that?” I ask.

“A woman I met in the laundry room said we couldn’t. She read it on the Internet.” Mom replies.

I turn to my brother Jamie, who’s been listening in.

“Can’t argue with logic like that,” he says.

This morning, just after 6:00, as I was coming into the office, I had to step accross a homeless man sleeping in front of the door.

As I was going into my nice warm office, I looked at him, curled up on the cold concrete, and thought, “Wow. He get’s to sleep in.”

Every March and April I spend most of my waking hours doing tax returns. Over the years I’ve noticed a strange phenomenon – just like fads and fashion, different tax deductions enjoy popularity in waves, and just as suddenly, disappear.

The first wave I noticed were ‘happy’ drugs – out of nowhere, everybody had prescription receipts for Prozac and Zoloft and Xanax.

Next it was therapists. Mounds of tidy little receipts, one hour at a time.

And this year it’s…dogs.

For some reason, all my canine loving clients want a tax deduction for their dog. Time after time I have to tell them – dogs aren’t deductible. You may love them like a child, but the Canada Revenue Agency is never going to allow them as an eligible dependant. Which is the way it should be.

Or is it?

If you are self-employed and have an alarm system, a portion of the monthly monitoring fee is deductible as a home office expense. Well, what better alarm than a keen eared, yappy dog?

And, what about those therapist fees? All deductible medical expenses. How is that better than unconditional love, 24/7, from your furry best friend?

Then there’s the meals and entertainment deduction, a legitimate business write-off for drinking and stuffing your face with somebody you just met. Call it ‘networking’. Can there be any better networking tool than a walk on a busy street with a cute puppy? Yet, while premium scotch at a bar is okay, a lap around the block with Rover is denied.

It’s time for CRA to allow dogs as a business expense. They’re cheap compared to a therapist, never require a visit from the police because of a forgotten security code, and provide a healthy and low-fat alternative to a business lunch.

Okay, maybe the whole dog shouldn’t be deductible, but at least an end of it should be. And since we’re talking about taxes, I think it’s clear which end I’m talking about.