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After Caitlin Walsh Miller’s father passed away without a will in January, 2025, she and her siblings had to decide who would be appointed the administrator of his estate.
Her brother was the obvious choice: He lived in Fredericton, where her father’s home was. But as medical professionals, both her brother and sister had carried the “really heavy load” of caring for her father, who had dementia, said Ms. Walsh Miller. So she volunteered for the job.
“I felt like I could finally help the team,” said Ms. Walsh Miller, a freelance journalist in Montreal. Before her father’s death, she had been his power of attorney for his finances and property.
However, managing his estate from Quebec came with challenges. While phone calls and paperwork could be handled remotely, banking was a different story. Every time she visited the Montreal branch of her father’s bank, Ms. Walsh Miller said she struggled to have his New Brunswick documentation recognized.
“I’m an easy crier, so I cried in a lot of banks and that seems to get people,” she said. “You already hear that very few people you deal with when you’re acting as a power of attorney or executor are going to be well-versed in legalities. You’re always explaining yourself.”
For Canadians taking care of aging parents from afar, distance compounds complexity
Canadians who become the executors of a parent’s estate are tasked with handling a significant administrative burden while grieving an often-shattering loss. Fulfilling those duties from another province or country presents additional hurdles, from navigating a new legal landscape to more practical considerations such as clearing out a parent’s home.
People underestimate how immediately “operational and hands-on” the role is, said Alysha Tse, a wealth adviser with Richardson Wealth Limited in Vancouver.
Executors’ tasks can include securing their loved one’s home and valuables, maintaining property insurance and making arrangements for any pets. “That’s an urgent, immediate responsibility,” Ms. Tse said, made more complicated for those coming from another province or country.
A common consideration for cross-provincial executors is the estate’s tax residency, said Leanne Kaufman, president and chief executive officer of RBC Royal Trust in Toronto.
For tax purposes, someone’s estate is considered a trust, and trusts are taxed based on where the “mind and management” of the trustee is located, she said. If a parent’s estate was being handled by an adult child in another province with higher tax rates, the estate could end up being taxed at those higher rates.
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Ms. Kaufman said travelling to the parent’s home province to make estate decisions can help address that issue, but that can become costly, especially for complex estates that may take longer to settle.
Different provinces have different probate rules and fees, said Amy Dietz-Graham, senior wealth adviser and portfolio manager with National Bank Financial Wealth Management in Toronto. Additionally, if a parent had properties or assets in multiple provinces, they would be subject to the probate process in all of those provinces.
Some provinces may also require an out-of-province executor to post a bond of indemnity. This is essentially an insurance policy to protect heirs and beneficiaries from the possibility of the executor mismanaging the estate. But it can affect the executor’s credit, Ms. Kaufman said.
Beyond the hurdles faced by estate executors in other provinces, those with parents in another country must navigate a different legal system, possibly in another language.
Rohini Mukherji, a Toronto-based public relations professional, had to handle her father’s estate after he passed away three and a half years ago in Bangalore, India. India’s legal system makes it easier for someone to pass assets to their children rather than to their spouse, Ms. Mukherji said. This is why, despite the fact that her father wanted to pass the family home on to her mother, his will instead left the property to Ms. Mukherji, his eldest child.
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She had to first complete paperwork to prove that her father was of sound mind when he wrote his will, then spend a few days in court in Kolkata to transfer the property to her mother, all of which ended up being more complicated than expected. But Ms. Mukherji said she was “glad for processes to be as slow as they were,” because it gave her time and space to grieve.
If a parent in another country names their child in Canada as their executor, their estate could become subject to Canadian taxes, said Rahul Sharma, a partner at Fasken Martineau DuMoulin LLP in Toronto who focuses on cross-border and international trust and estate planning.
“We see this most often where the parent is a resident in Britain or the U.S. or whatnot and named their Canadian kids as executors over assets that are entirely outside of Canada,” said Mr. Sharma.
“Very often people are missing excellent planning opportunities and bringing significant assets to the Canadian tax system” that should have remained outside it, he said.
There are also smaller challenges associated with dealing with a parent’s estate abroad, he said, including issues at a municipal office over the family home, or even the type of identification cards different governments will accept.
Hiring a corporate executor may make more sense for people whose preferred executor lives in a different province or country, Ms. Tse said. Corporate executors typically charge between 3.5 and 4 per cent of the estate’s value, she said.
In situations with multiple siblings, particularly if only one is local, splitting up executor duties can help manage the burden that might otherwise fall disproportionately to one person, Ms. Kaufman said.
“There isn’t always a good appreciation in the planning process for the impact on the relationships of people who are left,” she said.
Lizz Bryce and her two siblings shared caregiving duties for her father, who lived in Whitehorse, after he was diagnosed with intestinal cancer, and managed his estate together when he died in 2022. Ms. Bryce and her sister both live in Toronto, and her brother, who became their father’s executor, lives in Vancouver.
Her father rented his house, so the three took turns flying up to empty it out in the additional month they had left on the rental, and also divided other tasks. They’ve recently taken the same strategy to manage their uncle’s estate after he died in November in Bracebridge, Ont. As his wife had already died, they’ve been helping the rest of the family handle estate-related tasks.
“We split up as a team effort as much as we could — you cancel the hydro and you collect the mail, that kind of thing,” Bryce said.
Ms. Walsh Miller said she and her brother initially looked into being co-administrators on her father’s estate, but it would have required them to both sign off on every document, adding unnecessary time and administrative tasks.
But as she’s dealing with her father’s estate, which she said was complicated by his disorganization, she’s grateful to be working on it with her siblings. “We’re all on the same page and that made things easier.”
