Wills, Trusts & Estates
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June 20, 2025
OBA awards gala celebrates service to the legal profession and community at large
Toronto lawyer Angela Ogang had a good excuse not to attend the Ontario Bar Association’s annual awards gala June 19: She’d given birth to her baby the night before.
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June 20, 2025
Estate planning’s silent threat: The unpapered file
On June 5, 2025, I spoke as a panellist at the Ontario Bar Association’s webcast, “From Retainer to Reporting Letter: Avoiding Professional Liability and Negligence Claims in Estates Law.” The program included a case law update, a presentation by LAWPRO on the most common claims against lawyers in the area of wills and estates, and a lively discussion among the panellists about common pitfalls faced by lawyers practising in this area.
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June 19, 2025
FCA sets aside decision that declared Ottawa must fill judicial vacancies ‘within a reasonable time’
A novel Federal Court action that tried to compel Ottawa to fix its chronic tardiness in filling superior court vacancies has been dismissed for lack of jurisdiction by the Federal Court of Appeal; however, the law firm that launched the case to help its clients and other litigants says its efforts were not in vain.
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June 19, 2025
Three new lawyers join McDougall Gauley
McDougall Gauley LLP has announced that Manahil Arshad, Tanner Secord and Dathan Thomas have joined the firm as associates at its Saskatoon office.
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June 17, 2025
Canada ramps up sanctions against Russia for Putin regime’s ‘continued aggression’ against Ukraine
Canada announced new sanctions against Russia as leaders of the G7 Western countries met for a second day in Kananaskis, Alta.
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June 17, 2025
CBA backs constitutional amendment to constrain federal use of Charter’s ‘notwithstanding’ clause
In a rare move, the Canadian Bar Association (CBA) has thrown its support behind a Senate public bill (S-218), which proposes a constitutional amendment to restrict and structure the discretion of the federal government to breach Charter rights via the contentious s. 33 “notwithstanding” clause.
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June 17, 2025
Capacity: No one test to rule them all
Ontario’s Rules of Professional Conduct require lawyers to turn their minds to their clients’ capacity throughout the retainer. However, determining capacity is often much more complex than it initially appears.
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June 16, 2025
Indigenous legacies: Legal considerations for gifting cultural assets, possessory interests
Assisting Indigenous clients with estate planning can give rise to questions that simply do not come up when preparing wills for other clients, given the unique property interests that Indigenous clients may hold. Two such property interests that wills and estates practitioners may be unaccustomed to addressing in wills are cultural assets and possessory interests in reserve land.
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June 13, 2025
Trial judge erred in interpreting resulting trust in property dispute, finds B.C. Court of Appeal
In a mother-son dispute over a property, the B.C. Court of Appeal has found that the lower court judge committed a palpable and overriding error in interpreting the respondent’s resulting trust claim.
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June 13, 2025
Musings do not always give rise to enforceable promises, Ontario court says in dispute over farm
Ontario’s top court has overturned a decision that awarded damages to a man and his partner in a dispute over his parents’ farm, saying the judge in the case was wrong to raise the issue of proprietary estoppel.