Living Across Borders: Estate Planning Lessons from a Destination Wedding

This blog has been written by Pritika Deepak, Associate at Fasken LLP. Last week, I was in sunny Trinidad and Tobago celebrating the wedding of a close friend. We first met years ago when she came to Canada for undergraduate studies and later built a life in Toronto. The wedding brought together friends and family from across the globe, many of whom, like the bride, had meaningful connections to Canada….

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Estate Planning, Power of Attorney, Wills

The Invention of Charitable Options

The promise of venture philanthropy is seductive.  It aspires to harness entrepreneurial energy for the public good – to meld business methods with generosity to give back and create change.  That was the hope when I helped invent charitable stock options in 1999. Charitable Stock Options, or just Charitable Options, are a Canadian capital market charitable giving tool incubated in the dot-com era of late 1990s. In 2000 they were….

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Philanthropy/Charitable Giving

How Far Does a Power of Attorney for Personal Care Go? Limits Reaffirmed in Orr v Orr, 2025 ONSC 4986

scotiatrust

Today’s Post by Brianna Fable-Watson, Articling Student at Gowling WLG | Gowling WLG Ontario courts continue to emphasize that the authority granted to attorneys for personal care is legally constrained and subject to competing statutory rights, particularly in long-term care settings. The decision in Orr v Orr, 2025 ONSC 4986 (CanLII) provides a clear illustration of the limits of a power of attorney for personal care, where the Ontario Superior….

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Power of Attorney

Longevity Era: Lifestyle Planning – How about those joints?

If you’ve scanned financial services sales materials recently, it seems longevity is a hot topic. How do you actually plan for longevity?  As with most things, this is easier to talk about than do. In this article, let’s explore one aspect of lifestyle planning – mobility. A recent article on longevity noted that for over a decade, our practice has been focused on teaching and empowering individuals to actively plan….

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Smart Ageing

A Novel Approach to Locating Missing Heirs

Much has been written on All About Estates about “missing” elements in an estate administration – missing assets, missing heirs, and even missing estate trustees. In the case of missing heirs, the executors have an obligation to take reasonable steps to locate the beneficiaries of the estate. Executors cannot simply distribute the estate to those beneficiaries who are easy to find, or assume that missing beneficiaries do not exist. While….

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Estate Administration, Estate Litigation, Estate Planning, Executors, Trustee

Court of Appeal Confirms No Duty Owed by Lawyer to Non-Client

A recent Ontario Court of Appeal decision reinforced a simple but important rule: lawyers generally owe duties only to their clients – not to third parties who may be affected by their work. The case of Stingelin Estate v. Woods, 2026 ONCA 240 arose out of a family dispute over property, wills, and trusts. The case ultimately turned on whether a lawyer could be held liable to someone who was….

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Appeals
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