Why Manulife Wealth's Georges Achkar focused on structure in a volatile tax year
Tax efficiency had shifted from chasing clever deductions to building portfolios that could survive policy reversals and higher yields, and that shift ran through every decision Georges Achkar, Senior Investment Advisor at Manulife Wealth made for his clients. “Our strategy when it comes to investing, whether in bonds or in equities, has always been the same.”
He started with the structure of income, not the headline rate, especially in fixed income where many investors still focused on posted yields and ignored how those dollars showed up on their tax return. “When it comes to bonds, we have always privileged F-series funds that are tax efficient, We believe this gives you a better yield and better tax efficiency than a plain vanilla bond fund or GIC,” Achkar said.
Instead of loading up on fully taxable interest, he looked for bond funds that reshaped distributions in ways that reduced the drag in non registered accounts. “Some of these bond funds pay return of capital. Some of them pay dividends instead of interest. And some even have capital gains. This is by far better in terms of taxes than full interest, full taxable income at the end of the year,” Achkar said.
Rebuilding fixed income around tax
The bond sleeve in his approach was less about chasing an extra few basis points and more about choosing the right tax character for each client’s situation. By favouring F‑series funds and structures that could deliver return of capital, dividends or capital gains instead of straight interest, he tried to turn fixed income from a tax problem into a planning tool. That focus on structure over product labels aligned with how high‑earning clients, and especially incorporated professionals, actually experienced their after tax returns.
It also demanded more explanation. Georges said he spent time walking clients through why a lower headline yield could leave them with more money in hand once the Canada Revenue Agency had taken its share, and why they needed to compare after tax income streams, not just distribution rates. For clients who were used to GICs and plain vanilla bond funds, that shift in lens became a key part of reframing “safety” in a higher‑yield environment.
Capital gains whiplash and loss harvesting
The capital gains saga of the past year had only hardened his view that reactive tax moves could backfire when governments changed course faster than clients could adjust. “In March 2025, it was announced that the new capital gain inclusion rate was completely canceled,” he explained. Clients who accelerated gains ahead of the expected hike saw the rules shift under their feet. “When this was first announced, some clients chose to realize their gains prior to the cutoff date, but then the government went back on it, some of these clients were caught off guard by the changes,” Achkar said.
His team moved quickly to contain the damage once the reversal became clear, and the tools they used were basic but powerful. “Bottom line, we helped them out by realizing other capital losses, So at the end of the day, the net effect was not really significant,” he explained.
With the inclusion‑rate issue set aside for now, he saw little sense in building fresh plans around it. “In terms of a change of inclusion rate, there are no more changes in the Canadian inclusion rate since it was announced in March,” Achkar said. For him, the episode underlined how dangerous it was to let draft policy, rather than enduring principles, dictate client behaviour.
A hard ranking for RRSPs, TFSAs and FHSAs
If tax rules were unpredictable, his order of contributions was not, and he had little patience for the idea that RRSPs, TFSAs, RESPs and FHSAs were just different labels on the same bucket. “We believe that maximizing RRSPs is always the best solution, Rare are the cases when it is not,” he said.
The logic, in his view, was simple arithmetic about what clients saved today versus what they would effectively pay back later. “If you are getting a 50% rate, a 50% return today, and during retirement you are paying an effective 20% – and here I say effective, not marginal – at $80,000 of income in retirement your marginal tax rate will be 37%, but your effective tax rate will be 20%,” Achkar said.
That spread pushed RRSPs to the top of his list in most cases, even when it ran against common advice that put TFSAs on equal footing or ahead. “So RRSPs for us, in most cases, are always the number one priority,” he said. “I would say even before RESPs. I would say even before TFSAs,” he said.
First home savings accounts carved out a narrow exception, but he insisted on being precise about who could actually use them. Achkar explained “I would say FHSA if it is applicable, but we know very well that FHSAs are only applicable to clients that do not own a primary residence,”
Once RRSP and any eligible FHSA room were filled, he turned to education savings and then tax‑free savings, leaving non registered money to the end of the line so that every available incentive was used before clients exposed more income to full taxation. “After FHSA, I would say RESP, because with the RESP in Quebec, between the provincial and the federal return, you get about 30%,the chances are that children will most likely not pay any taxes on those withdrawals if done properly, then I would say comes TFSA, and after that non-registered,” Achkar said.
Retirement guardrails and the planning gap
The same hierarchy showed up again when clients started drawing on their assets, because for Georges the core question was not just how much cash a retiree needed in a given year, it was what each extra dollar of reported income did to their effective rate and their government benefits over time. “For retirement income, things become a bit different, cashing out those investments is not as dependent on their cash flow needs as it is dependent on their tax planning needs,” he said.
In practice, that meant withdrawals from RRSPs or RRIFs often diverged from a simple budget as he worked to keep total income inside tight bands that minimized damage.
Achkar explained “Somebody can need $50,000 a year and we can cash out $80,000, while somebody can need $120,000 a year and we can also cash out $80,000 from their RRSP or RRIF at that point. What you need to be aware of is, Number one, staying under a 20% effective rate, Number two, not hitting certain thresholds of income where your OAS can be clawed back. Then you go into a kind of double taxation mode, in the sense that if you are earning $1,000 over the OAS threshold, you are going to pay a 36% marginal tax rate, but you are also going to pay 15% in OAS clawback,”
Sequencing withdrawals from registered, tax‑free and non registered accounts became part of the same discipline that had shaped contributions in the first place. “So we want to make sure that as we are cashing out investments, we are careful about what to cash out and when to cash out...That is how we invest, and that is how we withdraw,” he said.
For all the complexity in products and policy, he argued that the failures he saw most often were far more basic and rooted in the absence of any serious long‑range planning. Achkar explained “In terms of tax efficient strategies, I feel that a lot of Canadians are very underserved in that matter....The financial planning tools or strategies that they need, in a lot of cases, are not optimized,”
In his view, no tactic stood on its own without a full projection of income, assets and liabilities over time that could expose where the real pressure points would be. “I think the core of any tax strategy should be a financial plan...I meet on a daily basis Canadians who do not have financial plans,” Achkar said.
