Can I place assets in my spouse's name to avoid Canada Revenue's callous hand?

Assets can be placed in anyone's hands, but a little more information is needed to answer your question.

If the asset is a capital asset, whoever owns it will pay taxes on the disposition (capital gains) should there be an income. The only difference is that your spouse may be in a lower tax bracket than you, thus the ultimate tax bill will be lower.

If these are work/business related assets, by placing the ownership in someone else's hands will cause a few accounting problems (and ultimately tax problems) in the business's books and records.

in most cases you cannot transfer assets to defer taxes. CRA works very hard at closing all those loop holes. Your best bet would be to work with an experienced tax professional (and make sure you ask for one)

If you are in a situation where you already owe, or will owe taxes for this year, and you transfer an asset to your spouse without receiving FMV for it, CRA will just raise an assessment against your spouse and collect the debt from them. You can't pretend to receive FMV, either - they will check into whether the supposed consideration is a sham or is legitimate. Your spouse will definitely not thank you for putting them into such a situation. Subsection 160(1) of the ITA and subsection 325(1) of the ETA apply to these transers.

As another poster mentioned, there are also other rules in the ITA about non-arm's length transfers of assets, and the income resulting from those transfered assets often ends up being taxed in your hands anyway. Have a look at subsection 74.2(1) of the ITA for details of that situation.