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October 23, 2026
When a person who goes by more than one name passes away, it is important to provide not only their legal name when applying for a certificate of appointment of estate trustee, but to also provide alternate names that the deceased used.
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October 23, 2026
For the first time in more than 50 years, the Court of Appeal for Ontario has updated its test for leave to appeal from a decision of the Divisional Court. In Knauff v. Ontario (Human Rights Tribunal), 2026 ONCA 653, a five-judge panel confirmed that the test for leave is whether the proposed appeal raises an arguable question of law or mixed law and fact that is of sufficient public importance to warrant consideration by the Court of Appeal.
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October 21, 2026
Dementia Justice Canada is urging Parliament to require an independent legal assessment before medical assistance in dying is administered under an advance request, warning that people who have lost decision-making capacity need protection from coercion, undue influence and abuse.
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October 21, 2026
Estate litigation can take months or years to resolve, but mortgage obligations do not wait. For estate trustees and beneficiaries, the core challenge is preserving the value of estate property while competing claims are litigated.
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October 21, 2026
For decades, the estate freeze has been a staple of succession planning for Canadian business families. The mechanics are familiar to any tax or estate practitioner: the owner exchanges growth shares for fixed-value preferred shares, and a newly settled family trust subscribes for fresh common shares that will capture all future growth. The tax benefits are well understood.
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October 20, 2026
Paul Reid has joined Fasken as a partner in its litigation and dispute resolution group, based in the firm’s Tsuut’ina, Alta., office.
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October 20, 2026
Outside of defence procurement, the Ontario Superior Court is perhaps the most dysfunctional government entity in Canada. Given that responsibility for the court is divided between the federal and provincial governments, that judges have decreed themselves above transparency or accountability, and that the system lacks meaningful feedback mechanisms, that result is largely to be expected. Still, watching this dysfunction play out in a small claims sheriff’s sale demonstrates a system plumbing new lows.
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October 20, 2026
With increasing longevity comes a host of challenging issues. One of them is maintaining an up-to-date estate plan.
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October 14, 2026
Alexander Holburn Beaudin + Lang LLP (Alexander Holburn) has launched a family law group in Vancouver with the addition of partners Jane Reid and Rosemary Gallo.
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October 13, 2026
Appeal by Harjit from orders dismissing his civil claim and cancelling a certificate of pending litigation against his late father Swinder’s residential property.
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October 08, 2026
Megan Walwyn has joined McEwan Partners as an associate in Vancouver.
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October 08, 2026
With the rapid progress of artificial intelligence in the legal field, we often hear the same question arise again and again: will AI replace the need for estate planning lawyers? It’s a fair question now that legal tech is able to draft a variety of documents, conduct legal research and review huge volumes of information in seconds.
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October 08, 2026
Part one of this series traced how charities and non-profit organizations are governed by two different, and now increasingly divergent, tests for advocacy activity under the Income Tax Act.
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October 07, 2026
Federal Justice Minister Sean Fraser says the Liberal majority government will introduce “in weeks” groundbreaking legislation to permit persons with serious medical conditions to consent in advance to medical assistance in dying (MAID), i.e. before they lose their capacity to consent to the procedure. The planned bill would also bar MAID access on an “indeterminate basis” to persons whose sole underlying medical condition is a mental illness, he said.
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October 07, 2026
Scarfone Hawkins LLP has welcomed James Price, Reilly McIlhone, Tania Robinson and Andrew Spelman as associate lawyers in its Hamilton office.
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October 06, 2026
Intergenerational estate freezes have long served as a bedrock mechanism for Canadian business owners seeking to defer tax and shelter wealth across generations. For years, corporate planners and family litigators assumed that routing future growth through a post-marriage discretionary family trust would cloak that interest as an excluded “gift after marriage” under Ontario’s Family Law Act (FLA).
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October 06, 2026
This is the first of a two-part series on the compliance landscape facing organizations that engage in policy advocacy, whether structured as 1) registered charities, 2) non-profit organizations or 3) commercial entities.
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October 02, 2026
The Supreme Court’s fall session is packed with interesting appeals in diverse areas of law including class actions, contracts, Crown immunity and Charter rights. The top court’s session begins Oct. 5 with an “opening of the court” ceremony in the West Memorial Building at 344 Wellington Street in Ottawa.
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October 01, 2026
The British Columbia Court of Appeal has upheld an oppression finding against a family company, ruling that a shareholder’s limited expectations while her father controlled the business did not restrict her entitlement to equitable treatment after her brother assumed control.
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October 01, 2026
Hafeez A. Khan has been appointed a judge of the Court of King’s Bench of Manitoba, Family Division, in Winnipeg.
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October 01, 2026
Mental health, job stress and keeping up with AI remain “front of mind” for the new president of Manitoba’s law society.
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October 01, 2026
Many people may be surprised and pleased to learn that there is a new path to becoming a Canadian citizen. The Government of Canada passed Bill C-3, An Act to Amend the Citizenship Act (2025), on Dec. 15, 2025. Before this legislation came into effect, Canadian citizenship by descent was limited to the first generation born outside Canada. For example, Emily was born or naturalized in Canada, and she could pass her citizenship to her child, Duncan, born outside of Canada.
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September 30, 2026
For executors, managing a deceased’s commercial covenants requires fulfilling the dead’s obligations without exposing the trustee to personal liability. It is incumbent on lawyers to inform, advise and protect their clients regarding these obligations.
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September 30, 2026
Supreme Court of Canada Justice Suzanne Côté says she finds intervener advocacy on Zoom to be as effective as oral submissions made in the courtroom, but she is also alive to contrary arguments made by legal organizations, such as the Canadian Bar Association and The Advocates’ Society.
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September 28, 2026
Section 84.1 of the Income Tax Act, the intergenerational transfer rules, has since 2024 contained a working exception for sales of a private company to a child’s corporation. Paragraph 84.1(2)(e) deems the vendor and the purchaser corporation to deal at arm’s length where the conditions of either ss. 84.1(2.31) or (2.32) are met, which switches off the deemed dividend and leaves the vendor with a capital gain eligible for the lifetime capital gains exemption — $1,275,000 for 2026. The conditions are not tax conditions. They are a statutory description of a vendor who has left the business, and the vendor’s counsel, not the accountant, is the one who has to make the client match it.