In the Finlayson Estate case the deceased owned certain shares in joint tenancy with her niece. The niece sought an order removing deceased’s husband as executor. She claimed that the 99 year old husband was not competent to administer the estate’ because of his age and infirmities at time of hearing.
A conflict of interest does not automatically result in the removal of an executor. A review of the case law and secondary authorities paints a coherent picture and legal baseline. For an Ontario judge to remove an executor on account of a conflict of interest s/he must be convinced that the removal is in the best interests of the estate.
In Kajaks Estate, the deceased named his stepson as executor. There were no distributions for eight years. At that point, pursuant to a court application, the executor was ordered to make interim distributions of $100,000 to each of the applicants. While the residuary beneficiary received an interim distribution, the applicants did not. The applicants went back to court and sought to find the executor in contempt of the previous order and to remove him for delay.
When a will challenger has no evidence to support the challenge, what strategy can lawyers take to inexpensively defeat the will challenge, vacate the notice of objection and move forward with probate?
In the recent case of Lee v. Ponte, the Court of Appeal for Ontario considered a novel argument about limitation periods. Others have written about the decision, but what piqued our interest was the Court of Appeal’s comment at the end of its short decision.
Choosing an executor is a critical decision. Before choosing who should manage your estate when you die the most important task is to ask if the person contemplated is up to the job. The ideal executor will follow your wishes, know how to administer the estate, be honest and fair, and be prepared to do the job in a timely and proper fashion.
Section 5 of the Estates Act (the “Act”) states “Letters of Administration shall not be granted to a person not residing in Ontario”. The statute appears to be a definite and full answer to our question. But, when answering a legal question, a thorough reading of the statutes and secondary sources dealing with the question together with a full review of how judges interpret the statute is necessary. As the Armstrong case demonstrates, reading only one section of the Act could lead to an erroneous conclusion.
Most people are not used to being involved in litigation. For all but the most experienced litigants, participating in the litigation process is stressful and often downright scary. One of the most anxiety causing steps is the discovery process. Representing frightened clients at discovery can be difficult.
Courts in the United States frequently seek assistance from Canadian courts to compel residents to produce evidence, either by way of document production or examinations. These letters of request for judicial assistance, or “letters rogatory”, are statutorily permitted under Canadian federal and provincial legislation. Canadian courts give significant weight to these US judicial requests and will rely heavily on the principle of international comity[1. The Supreme Court of Canada in Morguard Investments Ltd. v. De Savoye, (1990) 3 SCR 1077 defined “international comity” to mean “the recognition which one nation allows within its territory to the legislative, executive or judicial…
We have written two other case reviews concerning the decision in Rubner v. Bistricer. The first addressed the determination of the validity of a testamentary document while the testator was still alive and the second addressed with whether a letter was sufficient to create a trust. In this blog we are focusing on what appears to have been Brenda Bistricer’s driving motivation in taking certain positions.