For federal purposes, most credits can be transferred between spouses when one of them does not have sufficient income to claim them, i.e., pension amount, various disability credits, etc. Moreover, an individual may elect to declare all taxable dividends received by his/her spouse to the extent it enables him/her to claim or increase the amount of the spousal credit (see Section VII).

For Quebec purposes, a transfer mechanism makes it possible for an individual to deduct the unused portion of most of the non-refundable tax credits, except for the deduction with respect to the AMT carryover (see Section VII), among others.