Wills, Trusts & Estates
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June 17, 2025
Capacity: No one test to rule them all
Ontario’s Rules of Professional Conduct require lawyers to turn their minds to their clients’ capacity throughout the retainer. However, determining capacity is often much more complex than it initially appears.
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June 16, 2025
Indigenous legacies: Legal considerations for gifting cultural assets, possessory interests
Assisting Indigenous clients with estate planning can give rise to questions that simply do not come up when preparing wills for other clients, given the unique property interests that Indigenous clients may hold. Two such property interests that wills and estates practitioners may be unaccustomed to addressing in wills are cultural assets and possessory interests in reserve land.
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June 13, 2025
Trial judge erred in interpreting resulting trust in property dispute, finds B.C. Court of Appeal
In a mother-son dispute over a property, the B.C. Court of Appeal has found that the lower court judge committed a palpable and overriding error in interpreting the respondent’s resulting trust claim.
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June 13, 2025
Musings do not always give rise to enforceable promises, Ontario court says in dispute over farm
Ontario’s top court has overturned a decision that awarded damages to a man and his partner in a dispute over his parents’ farm, saying the judge in the case was wrong to raise the issue of proprietary estoppel.
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June 13, 2025
Rupert Murdoch’s family trust: Changing your mind can be hard
The elements of the recent Murdoch family trust dispute are a real-life drama even more interesting than an episode of Succession, thought to be based on the Murdoch family’s trials and tribulations.
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June 11, 2025
Multijurisdictional estates: Resealing and ancillary probate grants in Ontario
One of the first legal steps in managing the estate of a loved one who has passed away can be the need for probate — the court process that confirms the validity of a will and grants authority to the executor to administer the estate.
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June 10, 2025
Canada’s top judge declares ‘in this country, the rule of law is non-negotiable’
Lawyers, as officers of the court, have a professional “responsibility and obligation” to defend the rule of law and the independence of the bar and judiciary against attacks, Chief Justice of Canada Richard Wagner said at his annual news conference in Ottawa.
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June 09, 2025
Civil society advocates, information watchdog seek major overhaul of Access to Information Act
Advocates for greater government transparency and accountability have called on the Carney government to stand up an “independent” review — and then speedily overhaul — the much-criticized federal Access to Information Act.
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June 09, 2025
Ontario judge relies on contractual intent, factual context in business dispute involving estate
Pointing to a contract’s factual matrix, an Ontario Superior Court judge has awarded ownership of a North Bay, Ont., fishing store to one of its original partners in a dispute with an estate trustee — his deceased business partner’s surviving spouse.
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June 06, 2025
PM Carney appoints parliamentary secretaries to support lawyer-rich cabinet & PMO
Prime Minister Mark Carney has tapped a number of lawyers to assist the many lawyers he has already appointed to key cabinet posts.