Rudy Mezzetta
Estate practitioners are applauding an Ontario government proposal to provide courts with the power to save wills that might otherwise be found invalid due to technical errors — a power that already exists in the majority of Canadian jurisdictions.
When a will is deemed invalid, estate property is distributed according to the intestacy rules found in a province’s estate act, rather than as the deceased may have intended.
In all provinces except Ontario and Newfoundland and Labrador, the courts have a mechanism to save an otherwise invalid will and declare it valid. The eight provinces operate under what’s known as a “substantial compliance” regime.