Can a Will Override Joint Ownership With Right of Survivorship in Ontario?

Someone writes a will leaving "my share of the cottage" to one child, forgetting — or not realizing — that the cottage is held jointly with a sibling under a right of survivorship. When that person dies, does the will's instruction win, or does the joint owner simply keep the whole property? In Ontario, it's almost always the second answer, and this misunderstanding causes real conflict between families who assumed a will has the final say over everything a person owned.

The short version: a will generally cannot override joint ownership with a right of survivorship, because the asset never becomes part of the estate the will controls in the first place.

Why a Will Doesn't Reach a Jointly Held Asset

A will only has power over your estate — the property that legally belongs to you alone at the moment you die, and that passes through the estate administration process. Property you hold jointly with someone else, where that joint ownership carries a right of survivorship, works differently: at the instant one joint owner dies, ownership of the whole asset automatically shifts to the surviving owner or owners, by operation of law. It happens outside the estate, outside probate, and — importantly — before the will's provisions ever get a chance to apply to it.

Because the asset was never yours alone to leave, a clause in your will purporting to give "your share" of a jointly held, right-of-survivorship asset to someone else generally has no effect on that asset.

The Order of Operations, Step by Step

1. The joint owner dies. At this moment, right of survivorship operates automatically on the jointly held asset.
2. Ownership shifts to the surviving joint owner(s). This happens by operation of law, not by anything the estate trustee does.
3. The asset is now outside the estate. It's no longer available to be distributed under the will.
4. The will is administered separately, covering only what the deceased owned individually or as a tenant in common (a share that does not carry survivorship).
5. The will's gift of the jointly held asset simply fails — there's nothing left in the estate for that clause to attach to.

When the Will's Instruction Might Still Matter

There are limited situations where the outcome isn't quite so clean:

• The joint tenancy wasn't real to begin with. If the asset was only nominally joint — for example, a parent added an adult child's name purely for convenience — a resulting trust claim can pull the asset (or its value) back into the estate, where the will's terms would then apply after all.
• The joint tenancy was severed before death. An owner can convert a joint tenancy into a tenancy in common while everyone is alive, which ends the right of survivorship and lets that owner's share pass under their will instead. Once severed, it stays severed — a will written afterward can validly deal with that share.
• The asset holder's own rules matter too. Banks, land registries, and investment firms each have their own requirements for confirming a death and transferring an asset; even where survivorship applies legally, there's usually still a documentation step before the survivor can act freely.

The Bigger Risk: A Will That Doesn't Match Reality

The real danger isn't just that a clause "fails" — it's that people build an entire estate plan assuming their will controls everything, when a meaningful share of their assets are actually structured to bypass it entirely. This is especially common with:

• A house or cottage added into joint names years earlier for convenience
• Bank or investment accounts a parent shares with one child but not others
• Life insurance and registered plans with a named beneficiary — which also pass outside the will, though through a different mechanism than survivorship

If your will and your asset ownership don't line up, the people you actually meant to benefit may not receive what you pictured.

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