Qualification: another tax angle

Let’s look at these differences from another angle. Too often the differences are just boiled down to dollars and sense. In the application of taxes, or more specifically expenses, some times the differences come in simple qualification rather than numbers.
Meals for truck drivers (employees) are channeled through a form called a TL2. Without going into details of the simplified method, lets just say most drivers still use it and try to conform to several restrictions associated with the gross $51.00 per day allowance.
Restrictions for qualification come in both time and distance. The driver must be gone from his/her municipality for 24 hours or more and the driver must be 160 KM from his/her municipality.
In the comparison to the other meal system (estimated reimbursement for job related costs) the rules are completely different. Restrictions and qualifications are determined by an Employer Employee Agreement. These are and can be as varied as employees, unions and job titles themselves. However, let me give you one as an example. If the employee leaves their home before eight in the morning they qualify for breakfast. If they leave after eight am they are only allowed to collect re-imbursement on lunch (and onward if applicable).
So, as we see, certain citizens qualify on a meal to meal basis (no distance restriction at all) while other citizens are hamstrung by time and distance.
If a CRA auditor looked at the log of a driver who left at 7:45am on a Monday who returned at 6:00am Tuesday morning they would disqualify the trucker for the TL2 $51.00 meal allowance. No reductions, no allowance at all. It was as if they never ate a single meal in almost 24 hours.
This constraint (and many others) is totally government imposed. In other words the administration can change this restriction on any future budget. Nothing is secure, nothing is predictable. Changing these rules is a matter of: government greed, lobbying, public exposure and political will.
The only other tax option is for drivers to keep every meal receipt (an option CRA would love, seeing that most drivers in general would loathe the imposition). If a driver is gone all day, stuck in their truck, they still may not claim one penny of TL2 job related meal costs according to the qualifications stipulated. In this situation the qualification difference is not just 926% or 1200+% but INFINITE. One citizen qualifies absolutely and the other absolutely not.
This administrative strangulation to the trucking industry is, in my opinion, one of the primary reasons the industry struggles to attract and keep qualified employees. It is not only what they have done, or what they are doing but it is the fact that the entire tax system is vulnerable to tampering. Who would want to become perpetually vulnerable in their career?
The solution is and will always be total and absolute equality. Specifically lease/owner operators can achieve this almost instantly by having an employer employee contract with their employer (a corporation that they own themselves). Using their log books as official documentation for on and off travel status, operators can qualify for the benefits exactly the same as the most generous of employer contracts accepted by CRA. Skidoosh