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In estate planning, a parent typically wishes to provide for their children and each child’s family. However, this desire to benefit the child’s family often has a caveat: the child’s spouse should not receive any part of the inheritance in the event of separation or divorce.
In April 2017, the CBC reported that over 1,300 people in Canada have died with medical assistance since the Criminal Code was amended in 2016 to legalize medical assistance in dying (“MAID”). While this statistic points to the importance of MAID for many Canadians, the new legislation has not settled
On January 1, 2017, most of the provisions of the All Families Are Equal Act (Parentage and Related Registrations Statute Law Amendments), 2016 (S.O. 2016, c. 23) came into effect in Ontario. The intention of the Act is to establish new rules of parentage in Ontario to deal with the
A current trend in the increasingly expensive Canadian housing market is parents helping children or grandchildren and their spouses with a down payment or mortgage on a first home. In Ontario, about 35% of people buying homes now receive assistance from their relatives with a down payment and approximately 38%
Putting estate planning documents in place can be a daunting task, but it does not end there. Estate planning is an organic process that requires ongoing attention and revision. Circumstances in your life will continue to change and your main objective is to ensure that your wishes and intentions are
There are many things that we think about and plan for when we move–furniture, movers, schools, utilities… I could go on and on. There are even more things that we plan for when we move to another jurisdiction-language, taxes, visas, driving laws… and so it goes. But one thing you
Sometimes the law leads in pushing societal change forward, but often it lags far behind, particularly in the face of scientific innovation and rapid technological change. Over the past forty years or so, even how we define family has been subject to fundamental change, and in the future it will
In addition to purchasing a first home, the birth of a child is another momentous life event that often spurs people to prepare a will. Expecting parents and parents of young children are usually keen to put wills in place in order to ensure that if something happens to them,
The Ontario Family Law Act (FLA) determines the division of property between spouses on marriage breakdown. But what happens when a spouse is a beneficiary of a discretionary trust? By way of background, the FLA requires each spouse on marriage breakdown to value his or her “net family property” (NFP).
Blended families have become common, raising additional complexity for estate planning primarily due to differences in family dynamics and objectives. A failure to take these differences into account often leads to acrimony and disputes, which may irreparably damage family relations and thwart the estate plan. To minimize disputes and to
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