Family Trust Business Address in Canada: Trustee Mailing, T3 Returns, and the Bare Trust Carve-Out

Q: Where do you mail a T3 trust return?

Paper T3 returns are mailed to the CRA's Winnipeg Tax Centre, which is the central processing centre for all T3 trust returns regardless of where the trustee is located in Canada. Electronic T3 returns go through T3 EFILE. The trustee mailing address on the return — the address that determines where assessments and correspondence come back to — is a separate question from where the return is sent in; the return goes to Winnipeg, the assessment comes back to whatever trustee address is on the file. For details on the CRA address-change flow if the trustee mailing address needs updating, see the CRA Business Address Change article linked below.

Q: Whose address goes on the T3 — the settlor's, the trustee's, or the beneficiary's?

The trustee's address. The settlor's address is in the deed but does not flow to the T3. The beneficiaries' addresses go on the T3 slips that the trustee mails to them, not on the T3 return itself. The address on the T3 return — the address where the CRA mails assessments, reassessments, and review correspondence — is the trustee's mailing address. If there is more than one trustee, one is typically named as the primary trustee for correspondence and that primary trustee's mailing address is used.

Q: What is the Garron Family Trust decision about?

Fundy Settlement v. Canada, 2012 SCC 14 — usually called the Garron Family Trust decision — is the Supreme Court of Canada's ruling that a trust's residence for tax purposes follows the place of central management and control, not the formal residence of the trustees. The case involved a trust whose trustees were resident in Barbados but whose actual investment and distribution decisions were made in Canada; the court held the trust was Canadian-resident and therefore taxable in Canada on its worldwide income. The case applied the corporate "central management and control" test from De Beers (1906) to trusts, and it is the leading Canadian authority on trust residence. For a domestic Canadian family trust with Canadian trustees making decisions in Canada, the case rarely comes up; it matters most when there is a cross-border element to the trust's structure or trusteeship. ---

Key takeaways

A family trust has no separate legal identity of its own. It is a relationship between a settlor, one or more trustees, and a set of beneficiaries — and the "address" of the trust is, in practice, the working address of the trustee who administers it. There is no provincial registry that issues a trust a number the way one is issued to a corporation.
The CRA still needs an address. A family trust that has to file a T3 Trust Income Tax and Information Return gets a Trust Account Number (TXN), and the address on that file is the trustee's mailing address. Assessments, T3 slips for beneficiaries, and Winnipeg Tax Centre correspondence all flow to that address.
Trustee residence and trust mailing address are two different questions. The Supreme Court's Garron Family Trust decision (2012 SCC 14) held that a trust's residence for tax purposes follows the place of central management and control, not the postal address on a tax slip. A Canadian virtual mailbox handles the mailing question cleanly; the residence question belongs to wherever the trustee actually makes decisions.
Bare trust reporting under Income Tax Act s. 150(1.2) has been on and off since 2024. The original 2023-tax-year filing obligation was suspended for several filing years through CRA administrative relief, and the statutory carve-outs in s. 150(1.2) define the exceptions. The state of the rule for the current filing year should be confirmed against the CRA's T3 page before the next return is filed.

Scope note. This article is about a Canadian family trust — typically a discretionary inter vivos trust — and the address slots a trustee has to fill for T3 filing, T3 slip mailing to beneficiaries, and CRA correspondence. It is not about estate planning structure choice or asset-protection strategy. For the Holdco half of the common "Holdco + family trust" estate-planning pair, see Holding Company Canada Small Business Address. For income-splitting through a Professional Corporation where a family trust holds shares, see Professional Corporation Canada Business Address. For the T2 vs T3 mailing-address split, see Small Business Tax Filing Address in Canada.

What a family trust actually is — and what "its address" actually means

A family trust is a relationship, not an entity. When a settlor transfers property to a trustee to hold for the benefit of named beneficiaries, the law treats the trustee as the legal owner of the property and the beneficiaries as the equitable owners. The trust itself is the relationship that binds the three parties — settlor, trustee, beneficiaries — and it does not have a separate legal personality the way a corporation does. There is no incorporation number, no charter, no provincial corporate registry record. The constitutive document is the trust deed (sometimes called the deed of settlement), and the trust comes into existence the moment the settlement property is transferred on the terms of that deed.

That single feature — no separate legal identity — drives every address question that follows. A corporation has a registered office because the Canada Business Corporations Act or its provincial counterpart says it must. A trust has no statute that says it must have a registered office, because a trust is not a legal person that can hold an office. What the trust does have is a trustee, and the trustee has a working address, and that working address is what every CRA form, every T3 slip envelope, and every beneficiary notice is actually mailed to.

When a careless summary says "a trust does not have a separate legal identity, so it does not need an address," the part before the comma is correct and the part after it is wrong. The trust does not need an address in the corporate-registered-office sense. The trustee needs an address, because the trustee is the one filing T3 returns, receiving CRA assessments, mailing T3 slips to beneficiaries, and answering inspection-style queries from the Canada Revenue Agency. In practice, "the trust's address" and "the trustee's working address for trust administration" are the same thing.

For a family trust that runs an operating business — the family trust holds the shares of a Holdco that holds the shares of an Opco, for example — there is a second layer: the operating business itself has its own primary address (the Opco's registered office), and the trust's address is the trustee's mailing address, which is a separate address from the Opco's. The two should not be conflated. We map that fork into Holdco-and-trust structures in the dedicated Holdco address article.

The three parties and the three address questions

Every family trust has three roles, and each role raises a different address question. Keeping the three apart is what makes the rest of the filing flow tractable.

Role	Who they are	Address question that follows
Settlor	The person who transfers the original settlement property to the trustee on the terms of the deed	None ongoing — the settlor's address goes on the deed itself but does not flow to CRA filings after settlement
Trustee	The legal owner of the trust property who administers it for the beneficiaries	The mailing address for the T3 return, the CRA Trust Account Number, and all trust correspondence
Beneficiaries	The persons or class of persons entitled to income or capital of the trust under the deed	The mailing address for T3 slips reporting allocated income, and for any T3 NR slips if the beneficiary is a non-resident

The settlor's role typically ends with the settlement itself. After the original property is transferred on the trust terms, the settlor steps out and the relationship runs between the trustee and the beneficiaries. The settlor's home address sits in the deed for historical and evidentiary purposes, but the CRA does not require ongoing settlor address information on T3 filings.

The trustee is where the address work actually concentrates. The trustee files the T3 return, holds the Trust Account Number, and receives every piece of CRA mail concerning the trust. If there is more than one trustee, one of them is typically named as the primary trustee for correspondence and acts as the point of contact, and that primary trustee's address is the one that goes on the T3 file.

The beneficiaries matter for outbound mail, not inbound. When trust income is allocated to a beneficiary in a tax year, the trustee files a T3 slip (T3 Statement of Trust Income Allocations and Designations) reporting the allocation, files a corresponding T3 Summary with the CRA, and sends a copy of the slip to the beneficiary at the beneficiary's address. A Canadian virtual mailbox does not change that flow on the beneficiary side — each beneficiary has their own address. What the virtual mailbox does change is the trustee's side: a trustee who uses a Canadian virtual mailbox can scan T3 slips, file electronically through the CRA's T3 EFILE system, and have paper copies handled centrally from the mailbox rather than from a home address.

Where the T3 trust return is mailed

The T3 Trust Income Tax and Information Return is filed by the trustee for any trust that meets the filing thresholds in the Income Tax Act and the CRA's T3 administration. A T3 return is generally due within 90 days of the end of the trust's tax year (most family trusts use a December 31 year-end, making the T3 deadline March 31). The return reports the trust's income, the income allocated to beneficiaries (which becomes deductible to the trust and taxable to the beneficiaries under Income Tax Act s. 104 and s. 105), and the income retained by the trust (taxed at the top marginal rate under the inter vivos trust rules).

The address on the T3 file is the trustee's mailing address. The CRA processes T3 returns at the Winnipeg Tax Centre, and paper returns are mailed there; electronic returns are filed through T3 EFILE. The CRA mails assessments, reassessments, and any review correspondence back to the trustee's address on file.

Several practical points about the trustee mailing address:

A Canadian virtual mailbox in Toronto or Vancouver, in Canada Post Unit/# format, is a valid trustee mailing address. The CRA accepts a Canadian commercial street address with a unit or suite designator (Unit, Suite, Apt, #) in the standard format. PMB-style suite numbering used by some US-style mail forwarders is rejected by the CRA's address validation in many cases, and the standard Canada Post format is the safer input. We covered the format spec in detail in Canada Post address format.
A PO Box is generally not accepted for the trustee address on the T3 file in the same way it is not accepted as a corporation's registered office. The mailing address has to be a physical street address that supports actual delivery and, where needed, in-person service.
A change of trustee mailing address is filed with the CRA, not with a registry. Because the trust has no provincial registry record, the only address-change filing is the CRA's. The trustee files Form RC4288 (or the equivalent through My Trust Account / My Business Account) to update the address on the Trust Account Number record. For T3 reassessment requests or adjustments to a filed T3 return, the trustee uses Form T3-ADJ — that is a different form serving a different purpose, and we walk through the T3-ADJ vs RC4288 fork in CRA Business Address Change with a Virtual Address in Canada.
The trustee's residence and the trustee's mailing address can differ. A trustee resident in Vancouver who uses a Toronto virtual mailbox as the T3 mailing address is making a workflow choice, not a residence change. The trust's residence for tax purposes is a different question, addressed below.

Trustee residence vs trustee mailing address: the Garron Family Trust point

This is the part of the question that careless summaries get wrong most often, and it matters because the consequences (residence determines which country gets to tax the trust's worldwide income) are large.

In Fundy Settlement v. Canada, 2012 SCC 14 — the case the tax community usually calls the Garron Family Trust decision — the Supreme Court of Canada held that a trust's residence for tax purposes follows the place of central management and control, not the formal residence of the trustees. A trust whose trustees were resident in Barbados, but whose actual investment decisions were made in Canada by the Canadian beneficiaries and their advisors, was held to be resident in Canada and taxable on its worldwide income on that basis. The court extended the corporate "central management and control" test (from the long line of cases beginning with De Beers Consolidated Mines in 1906) to trusts.

What this means in practice:

The mailing address on a T3 return does not determine where a trust is resident. A Vancouver-resident trustee using a Toronto virtual mailbox does not make the trust an Ontario-resident trust. The trust's residence follows wherever the trustees actually make decisions about trust property — investment decisions, distribution decisions, accumulation decisions.
Using a virtual mailbox does not move a trust offshore or onshore. A Canadian-resident trustee remains a Canadian decision-maker regardless of where the mail is delivered. A non-resident trustee who is genuinely making decisions from outside Canada cannot be made resident in Canada merely by using a Canadian virtual mailbox.
For most ordinary Canadian family trusts the question never comes up. All the trustees are Canadian-resident individuals, all the decisions are made in Canada, and the trust is plainly Canadian-resident. Garron is the case that matters when there is a cross-border element, not when there is a domestic family trust with Canadian trustees.

We are not a tax practitioner, and the residence question for a cross-border trust belongs with cross-border tax counsel. The narrower address question — what address goes on the T3 form for a Canadian-resident trust with Canadian trustees — is the question a Canadian virtual mailbox is set up to answer.

Bare trust reporting under s. 150(1.2): what the rule actually says

The 2024 trust reporting changes are the part of the family-trust address question that has been most volatile, and the part most worth being precise about. The framework is in Income Tax Act s. 150 — specifically the carve-outs in s. 150(1.2), which list the categories of trusts that are not required to file a T3 even though they would otherwise be caught by the expanded filing rule.

The plain shape of the regime, with hedges where they belong:

The expanded T3 filing rule in s. 150 was designed to bring previously non-filing trusts (including many bare trusts) into the T3 system, with an additional Schedule 15 disclosing the settlor, trustees, beneficiaries, and protectors.
Section 150(1.2) sets out the carve-outs — categories of trusts that remain exempt from the expanded filing obligation. The list includes, among others, certain trusts in existence for less than three months, trusts holding only specified low-value assets, certain regulated financial trusts, registered charity trusts, and several other defined categories. The exact list, the dollar thresholds, and the conditions sit inside the statute and the CRA's administrative guidance, and they are the part of the rule that has been most actively interpreted since 2024.
CRA has applied administrative relief for bare trusts for several filing years since 2024, deferring the obligation that would otherwise apply, in stages and with carve-outs that have changed between filing years.

Because the bare trust reporting status has moved between filing years, the right thing to do before filing the next T3 is to confirm the current state of the rule directly against the CRA's T3 Trust Income Tax Information Return page on canada.ca, and the statutory carve-outs in s. 150(1.2) on laws-lois.justice.gc.ca, before the trust's filing deadline. The 2026 filing year position should be verified against those two sources before the next return is filed, and again the year after — the bare trust regime is the kind of rule that careless writing summarises as "no longer required," when the actual answer is "subject to administrative relief that has been re-issued at the CRA's discretion."

For the trustee address question specifically, the bare trust filing change does not alter where the mailing goes — when a bare trust is in scope to file a T3, the address on the file is still the trustee's mailing address, and a Canadian virtual mailbox handles that the same way it handles a discretionary inter vivos trust's T3 mailing.

The 21-year deemed disposition rule and the trustee's planning calendar

A family trust runs into one date the trustee cannot escape: the 21-year deemed disposition rule in Income Tax Act s. 104(4). On the 21st anniversary of the day a trust came into existence, the trust is deemed to have disposed of, and reacquired, its capital property at fair market value. Any accrued gains are taxed in the trust's hands on that 21-year date as if the property had been sold.

This matters for the address question for one reason: the planning to deal with the 21-year date — typically a rollover under s. 107(2) to capital beneficiaries before the 21-year anniversary — is administered through the trustee, and the trustee mailing address is the address all the CRA correspondence around that planning will flow to. A trust that has been running for 15 or 18 years has a planning event approaching, and the trustee mailing address is the file that the planning paperwork will accumulate against.

Three workflow points around the 21-year date:

The 21-year clock runs from the date the trust was created, not the date of any particular contribution or the date a property was acquired. Inter vivos trusts hit the date earlier than testamentary trusts, which restart the clock on death.
Section 104(5.8) is the anti-avoidance rule that prevents the 21-year clock from being reset by transferring assets to a "fresh" trust. A trustee considering any restructuring before the 21-year date should be doing it with tax counsel, not from a how-to article.
The CRA correspondence flow around 21-year planning is exactly the kind of high-volume, multi-form mailing that a Canadian virtual mailbox is built to handle — scanned same business day, kept in a single account, accessible to the trustee and the trustee's accountant.

For the trustee mailing address itself, the 21-year question changes nothing. The trustee files the T3 for the deemed-disposition year, the assessment comes back to the trustee's address on file, and the address on file is the same address it was the year before.

Where Auteur fits: Toronto and Vancouver as the trustee mailing address

Auteur runs two Canadian locations — Toronto (Ontario) and Vancouver (British Columbia) — and for a family trust the address fit is straightforward: the address is the trustee's mailing address, and either city works as a trustee mailing address. The fit is not about which province the trust is "in" (a trust is not in a province in the corporate-registered-office sense), but about where the trustee finds it most convenient to administer the trust's mail.

The four pieces a Canadian family trust gets from an Auteur address:

A Canadian commercial street address for the T3 file, the Trust Account Number, and all CRA correspondence, in Canada Post Unit/# format that the CRA's address validation accepts. The Trust Account Number, the assessments, the T3 reassessment notices, and the routine review letters all arrive at the same address rather than at a home address.
Toronto or Vancouver as the trustee's working address for trust administration, mapping the trustee's day-to-day location to a real Canadian commercial address rather than a home address. For a trustee who works between cities, or whose advisors and accountants are concentrated in one city, the geographic match is straightforward — Toronto for trustees centred in southern Ontario, Vancouver for trustees centred in the Lower Mainland or the West Coast.
Same-business-day scanning of inbound mail, so the T3 assessments, beneficiary correspondence, and Winnipeg Tax Centre review letters become digital files the same day they arrive. The trustee's accountant can see a T3 assessment the day it lands, not a week later when the trustee gets back from somewhere.
A Canadian-owned operator handling the CRA mail end-to-end, which matters for trust administration in a way it does not for some other use cases — the CRA T3 return, the T3 slip flow to beneficiaries, the TXN management, and the Winnipeg Tax Centre correspondence are all Canadian-only filings, and an operator that handles them inside Canada keeps the trustee's mail flow on one side of the border.

The Garron point applies here too: the address is the mailing address. The trustee's residence and the place of central management and control of the trust are wherever the trustee actually makes decisions, and a Canadian virtual mailbox in Toronto or Vancouver does not change that, in either direction. What it changes is whether the T3 correspondence lands at a home address or at a Canadian commercial address built to handle it.

Reserve a Toronto or Vancouver address →

Trust vs corporation vs partnership: three different address frameworks

For a settlor or trustee deciding between a trust, a corporation, and a partnership for a particular planning purpose, the address framework differs in ways that are worth setting out side by side. The frameworks are not interchangeable, and a guide that treats them as if they were is the kind of writing that produces filing errors.

Feature	Family Trust	Corporation	General Partnership
Separate legal identity	No — a relationship between settlor, trustees, and beneficiaries	Yes — a separate legal person with its own assets and liabilities	No — the partners are the legal persons, jointly and severally liable
Provincial registry record	None at the trust level (deed is private)	Yes — registered office filed with federal or provincial registry	Yes for declared partnerships in some provinces; varies
Statutory mailing address	None — practically, the trustee's mailing address	Registered office (statute-required, physical street address, in province)	Partnership address as declared, typically a partner's address
Annual CRA return	T3 Trust Income Tax and Information Return (where filing thresholds met)	T2 Corporation Income Tax Return	T5013 Partnership Information Return (where thresholds met)
CRA identifier	Trust Account Number (TXN)	Business Number (BN)	Business Number (BN) for the partnership
Address change form to CRA	RC4288 / My Trust Account	BN address update via My Business Account	BN address update via My Business Account
Adjustment-of-return form	T3-ADJ	T2 with revised figures or T2-ADJ	T5013 amendment

The key point for the family-trust address question is the first row. A corporation has a statutory address (the registered office under the Canada Business Corporations Act or its provincial counterpart) because the corporation is a legal person. A trust does not, because a trust is not a legal person. What a trust has is a trustee, and the trustee has an address. That is where every piece of trust mail goes — and that is the address a Canadian virtual mailbox is set up to be.

For the T2 vs T3 fork specifically, including the different Tax Centres and the different adjustment forms, see Small Business Tax Filing Address in Canada.

Trustee privacy: settlor's address, trustee's home address, beneficiary mail

A practical privacy issue runs through every family trust address decision. The settlor's address sits in the deed, the trustee's address sits on the T3 file, and the beneficiaries' addresses sit on the T3 slips. Three address surfaces, three different audiences, three different privacy answers.

The settlor's address is in the deed, but the deed itself is a private document. There is no public registry of trust deeds in Canada the way there is a public registry of corporate filings, and the settlor's address is generally not exposed unless the deed is produced in litigation or in a specific reporting situation. The privacy question that comes up for the settlor is whether to use a home address on the deed itself, which is a one-time decision at settlement.

The trustee's address is on the T3 file and on every piece of CRA correspondence. It is not on a public registry, but it is on a set of forms (the T3, the T3 slips, the RC4288 if the address changes) that move between the trustee, the CRA, the accountant, and the beneficiaries. A trustee using a home address has that home address moving through every one of those touchpoints. A trustee using a Canadian virtual mailbox in Toronto or Vancouver keeps the home address out of the trust-administration flow.

The beneficiaries' addresses are on the T3 slips the trustee mails out. The trustee sees them; the CRA sees them; nobody else does. The beneficiaries' own privacy is mostly their own choice — a beneficiary who wants to keep a home address out of the trust's records can use their own Canadian virtual mailbox as the T3 slip mailing address, on the same logic as a sole proprietor keeping a home address off public filings, which we walked through in Canadian Sole Proprietor Home Address Privacy.

For a family trust where the trustee, the settlor, and the beneficiaries are all members of the same family, the privacy benefit of a separate trustee mailing address is most visible at three points: when an accountant or counsel is added to the trustee's correspondence flow, when a beneficiary leaves home and the trustee does not want to use the family home address on outbound T3 slips, and when the trustee's professional address (a law office, a CPA's office) cannot be used as a personal-trust mailing address for conflict-of-interest reasons.

Frequently asked questions

Does a family trust need its own business address? Not in the corporate-registered-office sense. A family trust is a relationship, not a separate legal person, and there is no statute that requires it to maintain a "registered office" the way the Canada Business Corporations Act requires of a corporation. What the trust needs in practice is a mailing address for the trustee — the address that goes on the T3 Trust Income Tax and Information Return, on the Trust Account Number (TXN) record, and on every piece of CRA correspondence about the trust. That mailing address can be the trustee's home address, the trustee's professional office address, or a Canadian virtual mailbox in a city like Toronto or Vancouver. The CRA does not require a particular type of address; it requires a Canadian street address in Canada Post format that can receive mail.

Where do you mail a T3 trust return? Paper T3 returns are mailed to the CRA's Winnipeg Tax Centre, which is the central processing centre for all T3 trust returns regardless of where the trustee is located in Canada. Electronic T3 returns go through T3 EFILE. The trustee mailing address on the return — the address that determines where assessments and correspondence come back to — is a separate question from where the return is sent in; the return goes to Winnipeg, the assessment comes back to whatever trustee address is on the file. For details on the CRA address-change flow if the trustee mailing address needs updating, see the CRA Business Address Change article linked below.

Can a trust use a virtual mailbox in Toronto or Vancouver? Yes — the address on a T3 file is the trustee's mailing address, and a Canadian virtual mailbox in Canada Post Unit/# format is a valid trustee mailing address. What the virtual mailbox does not do is change the trust's residence for tax purposes. Under Fundy Settlement v. Canada (the Garron Family Trust decision, 2012 SCC 14), a trust is resident wherever the trustees actually make decisions about trust property, not wherever the trust mail is delivered. A Canadian-resident trustee using a Toronto or Vancouver virtual mailbox keeps the trust Canadian-resident because the trustee's decision-making remains in Canada. The mailbox handles the mail flow; the residence question follows the trustee.

Is bare trust reporting still required in 2026? The expanded bare trust filing obligation under Income Tax Act s. 150 has been the subject of repeated administrative relief by the CRA since the 2023 tax year, with the carve-outs in s. 150(1.2) defining the statutory exceptions. The state of the rule has moved between filing years, and the right answer for any given filing year is to confirm the current position directly against the CRA's T3 Trust Income Tax Information Return page on canada.ca and the s. 150(1.2) text on laws-lois.justice.gc.ca before the filing deadline. The general framework — that some bare trusts are caught and some are carved out by s. 150(1.2) — is stable; the question of which trusts are required to file in a given year has moved year over year, and is the kind of rule a tax adviser should be confirming for the trustee at filing time, not assumed from last year's answer.

Whose address goes on the T3 — the settlor's, the trustee's, or the beneficiary's? The trustee's address. The settlor's address is in the deed but does not flow to the T3. The beneficiaries' addresses go on the T3 slips that the trustee mails to them, not on the T3 return itself. The address on the T3 return — the address where the CRA mails assessments, reassessments, and review correspondence — is the trustee's mailing address. If there is more than one trustee, one is typically named as the primary trustee for correspondence and that primary trustee's mailing address is used.

Can the trust's mailing address differ from the trustee's residence? Yes. The mailing address is wherever the trustee chooses to receive trust mail — a home, an office, or a Canadian virtual mailbox in a different city. The trustee's residence is wherever the trustee actually lives, and a trust's residence for tax purposes follows the place of central management and control of the trust (the Garron point), which is wherever the trustees actually make decisions. A Vancouver-resident trustee using a Toronto virtual mailbox for the T3 file is making a workflow choice, not a residence change. None of the three — mailing address, trustee residence, trust residence — has to match the others, though they often do for a simple Canadian family trust.

What is the Garron Family Trust decision about? Fundy Settlement v. Canada, 2012 SCC 14 — usually called the Garron Family Trust decision — is the Supreme Court of Canada's ruling that a trust's residence for tax purposes follows the place of central management and control, not the formal residence of the trustees. The case involved a trust whose trustees were resident in Barbados but whose actual investment and distribution decisions were made in Canada; the court held the trust was Canadian-resident and therefore taxable in Canada on its worldwide income. The case applied the corporate "central management and control" test from De Beers (1906) to trusts, and it is the leading Canadian authority on trust residence. For a domestic Canadian family trust with Canadian trustees making decisions in Canada, the case rarely comes up; it matters most when there is a cross-border element to the trust's structure or trusteeship.

Bottom line

A Canadian family trust is a relationship between a settlor, one or more trustees, and a set of beneficiaries — and its "address" is, in practice, the trustee's working address for trust administration. The T3 trust return, the Trust Account Number, the CRA assessments, the T3 slips to beneficiaries, and the Winnipeg Tax Centre correspondence all flow through the trustee's mailing address. A trust does not have a registered office because it does not have a separate legal identity to register; what it has is a trustee, and the trustee has an address.

For a Canadian-resident trustee, a Canadian virtual mailbox in Toronto or Vancouver — in Canada Post Unit/# format — is a clean fit for the trustee mailing address. It handles the T3 file, the TXN correspondence, the beneficiary slip flow, and the routine CRA review letters in one place, scanned the same business day, while keeping the trustee's home address out of the trust-administration touchpoints. What it does not do is change the trust's residence for tax purposes; under the Garron Family Trust decision, residence follows where the trustees actually make decisions, and the mailing address sits next to that question, not in place of it.

The bare trust filing rule under Income Tax Act s. 150(1.2) is the part of the framework most worth re-checking each filing year — the carve-outs are statutory but the administrative relief has moved between years. The trustee mailing address itself does not move with the bare trust rule; whether or not a particular trust has to file in a particular year, the address on the file remains the trustee's mailing address, and a Canadian virtual mailbox handles that address consistently.