The sixty-second answer
Yes. Clause 150(1)(a)(i)(A) makes being resident in Canada at any time in the year an independent trigger for the filing obligation, separate from and joined by "or" to the tax-payable trigger. No income, no activity and no tax do not remove it. The only corporate exception is a registered charity. And the year you skip never closes, because the reassessment clock in subsection 152(3.1) runs from an assessment that was never made.
Four triggers, any one of which is enough
Paragraph 150(1)(a) requires a return within six months after the end of the year in two alternative situations [1].
Subparagraph (i) applies where, at any time in the year, the corporation: is resident in Canada; carries on business in Canada, with a narrow exception where its only Canadian business revenue is amounts taxed under subsection 212(5.1); has a taxable capital gain otherwise than from an excluded disposition; or disposes of taxable Canadian property otherwise than in an excluded disposition [1].
Subparagraph (ii) applies where Part I tax is payable for the year, or would be payable but for a tax treaty [1].
The structural point is that these are alternatives. Clause (i)(A) - residence - stands on its own and is not conditioned on income or tax. A Canadian-resident corporation that did nothing at all during the year satisfies clause (i)(A) and must file.
The common intuition runs the other way: no tax, no return. That intuition is reading subparagraph (ii) and ignoring subparagraph (i).
The only exception
Subsection 150(1.1)(b) disapplies the requirement where the taxpayer is a corporation that was a registered charity throughout the year [1].
That is the whole list for corporations. Notably, there is no general exception in section 150 for corporations exempt from tax under section 149. A non-profit corporation that pays no tax is not thereby excused from filing by this provision.
The penalty is nil, and that is the trap
Both late-filing penalties are computed as a percentage of tax payable for the year that was unpaid when the return was required to be filed [4].
For a nil year, that base is nil, and a percentage of nil is nil. There is no financial penalty for filing a nil return five years late.
This is exactly why nil years get skipped. The immediate cost of not filing is zero, so the decision looks free. The costs are real but they are deferred and structural, and there are three of them.
Cost one: the year never closes
This is the significant one. Subsection 152(3.1) defines the normal reassessment period as ending three or four years after the earlier of the day of sending of a notice of original assessment, and the day of sending of an original notification that no tax is payable [2].
Both triggers require the CRA to have assessed something. If no return was filed, no assessment was made and no notification was sent, so the clock never started.
A year you filed and that was assessed nil is closed after three years. A year you never filed is open indefinitely.
The asymmetry is worth sitting with. Filing a nil return is not a formality that achieves nothing. It is the act that starts the clock running toward finality. Skipping it preserves the CRA's ability to assess that year for as long as the corporation exists.
Cost two: the records obligation does not begin
The retention rule has a matching structure. Subsection 230(4)(b) sets six years from the end of the last taxation year to which the records relate [3].
But subsection 230(5) overrides that where a return required by section 150 has not been filed: records relating to that year must be retained until six years from the day the return for that year is actually filed [3].
So an unfiled year has a retention period that has not started. The six years begin whenever you eventually file, which may be a decade later, meaning the records must be kept throughout the interval and for six years afterwards.
Cost three: demands and the repeat penalty
Subsection 150(2) permits the Minister to demand a return [1]. A demand converts a dormant gap into an active obligation with a date attached.
It also feeds the repeat-penalty machinery. Subsection 162(2) requires both that a demand have been sent under subsection 150(2) and that a penalty have been exigible for one of the three preceding taxation years [4]. Its rates are 10% plus 2% per complete month for up to 20 months.
For a genuinely dormant corporation with no tax payable, that still computes to nil. But dormancy is not always permanent, and a corporation that becomes active again while carrying a history of unfiled years is in a materially worse position than one that is not.
Where this actually bites: groups
A single dormant company is easy to keep track of. The problem scales badly.
Holding structures accumulate entities. A corporation set up for a project that did not proceed, a holdco between two operating companies, an entity retained because dissolving it was never a priority. Each of them is resident in Canada and each of them owes a T2 every year for as long as it exists.
The failure mode is predictable: the active companies get filed because they have tax consequences and someone is watching, and the dormant ones do not because filing them costs money and produces nothing visible.
Per-return pricing makes that worse by putting a price on each nil filing, which turns a compliance requirement into a cost-benefit judgement that reliably comes out the wrong way.
MapleTax Unlimited is priced against exactly that shape of problem: a flat annual fee covering unlimited T1 and T2 returns, so filing a dormant entity's nil return is an administrative act rather than a decision about whether it is worth $60. For accountants and multi-entity owners the arithmetic is straightforward, and the compliance behaviour it produces is better because nothing is gained by skipping.
Dissolving is the other answer
The obligation runs while the corporation exists. If an entity has no purpose and will not have one, dissolving it ends the annual requirement in a way that ignoring it does not.
That is a corporate-law step with its own tax consequences and it is worth advice. But it is the only route that genuinely removes the obligation. Between "file a nil return each year" and "dissolve it", there is no third option that works, and the thing many owners are actually doing - nothing - is the option that keeps every year open forever.