Will a Canadian court vary or set aside a will when a parent disinherits a gay/lesbian child because of his/her sexual orientation? The law may be different depending on the province.
In Canada, the law balances the idea of testamentary independence against public policy concerns. While cherishing testamentary freedom, the law intervenes when it finds provisions in the will offensive to public policy and or equity. In Ontario, this restriction on testamentary freedom has been expressed by laws passed to protect spouses (under Part I of the Family Law Act) and dependants (under Parts II and V of the Succession Law Reform Act).
Two true stories from British Columbia: In both Patterson v. Lauritsen and Peden v. Peden Estate, a parent disinherited or reduced the inheritance of a child because the parent did not approve of the child’s homosexuality. The court in each of these cases held that, in today’s society, homosexuality is not a factor that would justify a judicious parent disinheriting or limiting benefits to a child.
Would the same thing happen in Ontario? Maybe – maybe not. In the British Columbia cases, even though the parents had capacity and were not subject to undue influence, their wills were open to challenge on the grounds that the parents had disinherited their children without, what the court considered to be, reasonable cause. While the Ontario Court of Appeal has stated that the “moral considerations” underpinning the British Columbia approach apply in Ontario, to my knowledge, there has been no case to date where an Ontario Court has varied a will to benefit a non-dependant disinherited adult child. In Ontario, except where a will offends public policy, it is still open to debate whether a capable parent, acting voluntarily, is entitled to disinherit a child – however whimsical, mean-spirited, or controlling such action may seem.
A comment made by an Ontario judge in 1995 is of interest, insofar as it suggests where an Ontario court may draw the line. In Fox v. Fox Estate, a decision of the Ontario Court of Appeal, the father named his wife the executrix under his will. The income was to be used for the grandchildren with the capital for the son. The will also gave the mother an unfettered discretion to encroach on the capital of the estate for the benefit of her son’s children. She took all the capital, eliminating her son’s inheritance because he was involved with a non-Jew. The judge commented, “… in response to a query from the bench, counsel in this case were not prepared to argue that any court would today uphold a condition in a will which provides that a beneficiary is to be disinherited if he or she marries outside of a particular religious faith.” The court viewed the mother’s behaviour as being mala fides and contrary to public policy.
Testators that ignore the changing winds of public policy do so at their own peril. In M v. H, the Supreme Court of Canada compelled Ontario to change the definition of ‘spouse’ as set out in the support provisions of the Family Law Act. Before that case, common-law heterosexual couples were included in the definition of spouse, but gay and lesbian couples were not. The Supreme Court of Canada ruled that, for the purposes of support under the Family Law Act, a spouse includes “… either of two persons …” The court ruled that limiting the definition of ‘spouse’ to heterosexual couples, for the purposes of support, was discriminatory and not justifiable. In Canada today samesex marriages are legal. It is, therefore, entirely possible that an Ontario court would set aside a provision in a will that disinherited someone because of his/her sexual orientation, on the grounds that such disinheritance offended public policy.