Does selling my corporation's investments trigger a refund of RDTOH?

Selling an investment inside your corporation can add to its RDTOH balance, since a resulting capital gain is taxed as investment income and generates the kind of refundable tax that builds up the RDTOH account, but the sale itself doesn't trigger the actual refund. The refund only happens when the corporation subsequently pays out a taxable dividend to its shareholders; selling the investment builds the balance available to be refunded, while paying a dividend is the separate step that actually claims it.

This distinction matters for planning: a corporation that sells a significant investment and generates a large RDTOH addition, but never pays dividends, simply has a growing, unrecovered balance sitting in the account rather than any actual cash benefit flowing back to the corporation or its shareholders. The tax paid on the gain when the sale happened isn't returned automatically just because it added to RDTOH.

Because these are genuinely two separate events, a sale that builds the balance, and a dividend that recovers it, corporations planning to sell significant investments should think about dividend timing as part of that same decision, rather than assuming the sale itself does anything to bring cash back through the RDTOH mechanism.