RE:Norbert's Gambit
I was gonna mention this when Dibah commented about selling in one currency and buying the other... it's much easier to just 'Journal' the shares over to the currency your comfortable with.
I kinda started this whole convo when I mentioned my experience with Scotiabank trying to keep the dividends in American rather than taking the automatic conversion (which when I was researching online it said you could tell your broker specifically how you wish to receive, which doesn't seem to be the case), that it might be more beneficial for me to Journal the shares to US and not have to pay bank specific conversion fees on the dividends.
I've watched the conversation go back and forth but I'm not overly confident in the answers about the taxation as people are holding this in various accounts and ways, not that I don't doubt the posters experiences, but it seems like the situation is very specific to how and where you hold it and isn't the same for everyone.
I would think the IRS has thier fingers in the pot to any equity traded on a US market no matter the country of origin or your origin, just like CRA has fingers in foreign owned companies traded in Canada. There are ways to pull taxation back as there are taxation treaty's, but in my experience with my amounts invested it's not worth the time, costs and headaches as I've been denied a US tax number on 3 attempts for 3 completely different paperwork reasons that didn't make sense and contradicted with previous attempts to get organized to utilize the tax rules. My tax experts can't even figure out the issues and advised not worrying about what the IRS does to my taxes on thier side and just do my normal Canadain taxes and we haven't had an issue.