Awilhelmsen AS → the Ontario holdco

The Norwegian family holds its wealth in a company and sells from it in bursts. A holdco above an operating company is ordinary in Ontario too — but it works for them because the underlying asset is a liquid listed stock they can turn into cash at will. Yours is not.

For a private Ontario software company the holdco's jobs are different: creditor protection (moving retained earnings out of the operating company's risk), tax-deferred intercorporate dividends, and preserving the lifetime capital gains exemption on qualified small business corporation shares. That last one has a live trap worth knowing about: the QSBC tests require most of the company's assets to be used in an active business, and excess cash or passive investments sitting inside the opco can fail them — which can cost you the exemption on a future sale. "Purification" is the usual remedy and it takes planning time, not a year-end decision.