Digital assets was an interesting topic of conversation at this month’s OBA Brown Bag Lunch (BBL) session. Digital assets usually refer to virtual or intangible assets and can range from blogs to Air Miles to online accounts (i.e. financial, Facebook, YouTube, etc.), to online gaming assets such as in virtual…
Month: November 2015
Total 21 Posts
A testator should, for the most part, be able to read and comprehend the terms of his or her Will. Yet even a Will drafted in so called “plain English” may contain a couple of terms or phrases (“issue”, “per stirpes”, “in specie”) with special meaning and/or not used in…
I have no statistics on this, but anecdotally, I have had many conversations lately with fellow estate litigators who have noticed the same recent trend in their practices. That rather unseemly development is this: expectant beneficiaries no longer wait until a person is dead to start fighting over inheritance money. …
The CRA was asked whether voluntary contributions of capital to a Trust by its beneficiaries would cause the Trust to lose its status as a Personal Trust.
Those of us in Toronto this morning woke up to… snow! The weather is a picturesque reminder that the holiday season is nearly here. For many, December inspires consideration not only of what gifts to make to family and friends, but also of what gifts to make to charity.
Many families will be traveling this week for the American Thanksgiving holiday. If you live in a different city than your parents, the time spent together during the holiday can allow you to see how well they are managing. Be aware of the small things and things that are different….
Being a provincial jurisdictional issue, health care reform was not a hot button topic during the media’s election coverage. But health care issues and reform are fundamental to the current issues facing our governments, be that at the municipal, provincial or federal level. “Home Care,” that is, support services for…
The combination of “private foundation and perpetuity” is a bit like “Fred and Ginger”, always linked in the public mind. Since 2000, however, the charitable status of 1,750 Canadian private foundations has been revoked. Of that number, 1,088 private foundations deregistered on a voluntary basis at the request of trustees…
A recent spate of media articles has emphasized the rapid growth of an elderly or “geriatric” cohort who are regularly referred to as ‘65 and over’. This has been labelled the “Silver Tsunami”, an unfortunate term that does not apply to most older women in North America. In my case,…
With the most successful Toronto Blue Jays season in recent memory now over, another Major League Baseball team was in the news for less fortunate reasons. According to an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia Phillies co-owner John Middleton is in litigation involving a claim by his sister, Anna Nupson….