Firoz Ahmed, Law’84, still remembers his first taste of tax law. As a business undergraduate, he took an elective law class and discovered a certain joy in making sense of tax legalese.

“I liked figuring out the answers just by reading the Income Tax Act,” he says.

When Ahmed arrived at Queen’s Law in 1981, focusing on taxation felt like a natural next step.

Today, he is a partner at Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt LLP in Toronto and one of Canada’s leading tax lawyers. He has advised on some of the country’s biggest and most complex deals. His work covers mergers and acquisitions, corporate reorganizations and international transactions. He is known not just for technical skills, but for judgment clients rely on when the stakes are high.

Over the years, Ahmed has earned wide recognition. He has been named by Chambers Global and the Canadian Legal Lexpert Directory as a leading corporate tax lawyer.

Yet Ahmed’s path to Bay Street started far from downtown Toronto. He was born in India and came to Canada as a child when his family settled in Ottawa.

At Queen’s, he found a strong legal education and a community that has lasted more than 40 years. He keeps in touch with classmates and remembers professors like David Mullan, whose teaching left a mark. “It was a fantastic experience,” he says.

During classes, tax law again caught his interest. With a business background and a structured way of thinking, Ahmed was drawn to its problem-solving side. “It’s not really about crunching numbers,” he explains. “It’s about understanding where you start, where you want to end up, and figuring out how to get there.”

That mindset has defined his career. After articling at Osler and being called to the bar in 1986, he joined the firm and, as he puts it, “just stayed.” Over time, he built a practice advising corporate clients on structuring deals in a tax-efficient manner. It’s detailed work that rarely makes headlines, even on major transactions, but shapes how deals are done, risk is managed, and value is created.

“You have to understand the legal rights and obligations, and you’re there to guide the client through it,” he says. Increasingly, that guidance involves weighing uncertainty, coordinating across jurisdictions, and helping clients understand not just what is possible, but what is prudent.

Over the years, Ahmed has worked on deals involving North American giants — from CN and Morgan Stanley to Tim Hortons and Hydro One. But two transactions in particular stand out.

The first came in 1999, when British American Tobacco acquired Imasco, then the owner of Canada Trust and Shoppers Drug Mart. “It was an incredibly complex transaction,” Ahmed remembers. As part of the deal, Canada Trust was acquired by TD Bank and Shoppers Drug Mart was later divested.

The second involved what was then one of the largest transactions in Canadian corporate history: BCE’s $73-billion spinoff of Nortel Networks, which used a tax-deferred arrangement that allowed BCE and its shareholders to defer paying capital gains taxes. At the time, BCE was Canada’s most widely held stock with some half a million Canadians owning shares. “It was a spin-off and a cutting-edge type of transaction that hadn’t been structured that way before,” he says.

Early in his career, Ahmed spent 15 months on secondment with the Canada Revenue Agency’s Rulings Directorate. There, he saw how tax laws are interpreted and applied. The experience reinforced the importance of judgment when dealing with complex rules.

Since then, the Income Tax Act — and the transactions built around it — have become far more complex. “When I started, you learned things as they came along,” he says. “Now, new lawyers are faced with everything at once.”

What advice does he have for today’s young lawyers?

First, take artificial intelligence seriously. Like most service professions, AI will have a profound impact on the legal field, he believes. So lawyers need to understand how to use it.

Second, learn to write clearly. Even as tools like ChatGPT improve, the ability to explain complex ideas matters. “There’s still a surprising amount of written communications done in this field,” he says. “Clients need clarity.”

In the end, that’s what a tax lawyer does – not just know the rules, but make sense of them.

By Rob Gerlsbeck