Sharing interest on a bank savings account?

[LJBill]

Situation: one spouse is solely on the title of a bank savings account. Can the interest earned be split between the spouses for income tax under CRA?

The source of the cash in the account is difficult to trace. It derives from US sources (via currency exchange from US) that may have been in extant for 2-3 decades. In my own (US-centric) eyes, the spouses share this equally.

Another wrinkle is that those US sources of capital put into the Canadian bank all derive from a single spouse's US work earnings.

My (unpleasant) take is that CRA will expect the earning spouse to declare all the interest. And that this would apply even to a jointly owned Canadian bank account. It begs the question, when do individual assets become joint property in a marriage? I know that this is treated very differently here in Canada than in the US.

[nelsona]

The rule for CRA is the income generated by a joint account is apportioned based on what was contributed by each party.

So, you need to know from which US accounts were funds DEPOSITED/TRANSFERRED to the Cdn bank: yours, the spouse's or a joint account. What happened before those transfers can be ignored.