If you cant sell your house, you rent it out in your previous country. Must be a few in that boat then.

So then it gets complicated Is this right?

You pay tax on your canadian income in Canada.

You pay tax on the rent received on your previous home in UK/OZ in that country, but that country no longer views you as a resident so your tax goes up.

Your rent YOU pay in Canada is not deductable anywhere despite you paying tax on your rent from the previous home.

Any savings in your previous country are taxed by Canada or the previous country?

As a TWP holder you cant claim tax relief/allowance for having kids in Canada and obviously cant claim it in your previous country, is that right.

I rang the ATO and they as always directed me to their website which is like trying to untangle spaghetti.

Anyone put what their experience of all this has been

Yes.

Does it? I didn't know. But you're in Oz, and I assume you have familiarized yourself with Aussie tax rules.

That is correct.

Something that might be worth looking into is whether Australia would tax you on the gross rental income or the net rental income from your property. In Canada only net rental income is taxed. That is, the landlord is allowed to deduct the expenses he incurs with respect to the property -- mortgage payments, property taxes (similar to council taxes), fees to any agent who was contracted to manage the rental, repairs to the property, etc.

Yes.

Once you're a tax resident of Canada, you're taxed on your worldwide income. However, many countries (including Australia) have tax treaties with Canada. This means that Canada would give you credit for tax you had paid in Australia, and you would not be taxed twice on the same income.

That is partly correct. You can claim tax relief for your children right from the start, in the sense that you get an automatic deducation from your income tax if you have a child. The deduction is not that large, but it is a deduction. If I was to respond to you as accurately as possible, I could not let that technical error go unchallenged.

But it is true that a TWP holder has to wait for 18 months before he/she is eligible to claim the Canadian Child Tax Benefit or the Universal Child Care Benefit.

I've just glanced at Australia's Family tax benefit tax claim instructions 2008. For you to be eligible, Australia would have to be your usual place of residence. It's obvious to me that, if you moved to Canada, worked in Canada, lived in Canada, sent your children to school in Canada, it woud be Canada and not Australia that would be your usual place of residence. Therefore you would not be eligible for Australian family tax benefits once you'd moved to Canada.

I don't know if you have any money in a superannuation plan. Britons who have those kinds of investments in the UK are allowed to transfer the funds from those schemes to Canada and, if they do it the right way, they don't have to pay tax on the transfer. Generally the funds from the UK scheme would be transferred to a Registered Retirement Savings Plan (RRSP) in Canada.

I don't know if Australia has a similar arrangement with Canada. That is, I don't know if Canada would allow you to transfer funds from a superannuation plan to an RRSP. Normally, the amount of money you're allowed to invest in an RRSP each year is a percentage of your income in the previous year, up to a certain ceiling. If you tried to deposit a large amount of money into an RRSP account, it might be a much larger capital sum than your RRSP investment limit for that year. And your limit during your first year in any case would be impossible to assess, since you hadn't worked in Canada during the previous year.

The arrangement Canada has with the UK is that people are allowed to make large transfers from their UK pension-type plans and deposit them into a Canadian RRSP without incurring penalties.

When we moved in the other direction (from Canada to Australia), Australia would have recognized the tax-protected status of our RRSPs for only five years. (This was in the 1997 - 2000 period.) If we'd stayed in Australia for more than five years, our Canadian RRSPs would have lost their tax-protected status.

This was all the more ironical, because we had locked-in RRSPs. We weren't allowed to access the interest, dividends and capital gains that our RRSPs enjoyed. And yet, after five years, Australia would have taxed us as if the interest, dividends and capital gains had reached our hands.

That was one of several factors that prompted us not to stay on in Oz indefinitely. It was a tough decision, because we really liked Oz (and specifically our home in Melbourne).

We were in our late forties when we returned to Calgary in January 2000. We realized that, the older we got, the more financial implications there were to each decision we made. What I'm trying to say is that moving when you're middle aged is different from backpacking around the world in your twenties.

It looks to me as if you've found the Taxes-Canada section of the Wiki but, just in case you have not, here is the link.

Hope that helps.
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Your a star as usual Judy, thank you. Your right that trying to do this is very complicated compared to the backpacking days, especially given we just wanted to sell up and not have any of this rental business, or dire currency fluctuations.