The decision of Milne Estate (Re) (“Milne”) caused a stir among the members of the estates bar and solicitors who draft wills, going so far as to illicit an alert from LawPRO. While the Milne decision (which is under appeal) has garnered a great deal of attention and commentary from lawyers (including Justin de Vries’
“He knows where the bodies are buried” is a throwaway line from Orson Wells’ cinematic masterpiece, Citizen Kane. That line soon took on a life of its own and entered the cultural vernacular. In the world of estates, a more frequent problem is not finding the bodies but deciding where to bury the bodies. In
As Justice S. Nakatsuru observed in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice’s decision in Sinclair v. Harris, 2018 ONSC 5718, “[n]o one likes to see a limitation period applied to dismiss a case”. That being said, and as we will soon learn, even if they result in less than satisfactory conclusions, there are good reasons
A centuries’ old practice gives personal representatives one year after the death of a deceased to wind up the deceased’s estate[1]. This is often called the “executor’s year”. However, in today’s world, it frequently takes more than one year to administer an estate. What happens if a personal representative does not or is not in
Can an estate trustee move to strike a beneficiary’s Notice of Objection to Accounts in the face of their Application to Pass Accounts, based on any of the Limitations Act, 2002, and/or laches and acquiescence? This was the discreet, though important, issue considered by the Ontario Superior Court of Justice in Wall Estate, 2018 ONSC
