No Will, No Marriage: A Landscaper's Estate Goes to Siblings

The situation

Winnie and Raymond had run a landscaping business together out of London for eleven years. They were not married. Early on they had talked about it, decided a wedding wasn't important to them, and never revisited the question. They owned a house together, jointly held some equipment and a work truck, and had built a client list that kept crews busy from April through November. Raymond handled the estimating and the equipment; Winnie ran the books and the client relationships. Neither of them had a will.

Raymond died suddenly of a heart attack at 52. There was no warning, no diagnosis, no time to plan. Winnie was left not just grieving but running a business with employees expecting paycheques, a house with a mortgage in Raymond's name alone, and no legal document telling anyone what Raymond wanted done with any of it. She assumed, as many common-law partners do, that as his partner of over a decade she would simply inherit what he had. That assumption turned out to be wrong, and finding that out was the second blow in a matter of weeks.

What the estate search found

When a person dies in Ontario without a will, their estate is distributed under the intestacy rules in the Succession Law Reform Act. Those rules follow a fixed order: a married spouse first, then children, then parents, then siblings, then more distant relatives. Critically, that order is built entirely around marriage. A common-law partner, no matter how long the relationship or how much they contributed to a household or a business, has no automatic entitlement to a share of an intestate estate. Ontario's inheritance rules have not caught up to how many long-term couples actually live.

Because Raymond and Winnie were never married, Winnie was not an heir. Raymond's next of kin under the intestacy rules were his parents, both of whom had died years earlier, and then his siblings. He had two: a brother who had moved out west and had barely stayed in touch, and a sister, Deepa, a hairdresser who ran her own salon a few hours away. Raymond and Deepa had been estranged for close to ten years after a falling-out over their late parents' affairs. Neither Winnie nor Deepa had spoken to the other before the funeral. Under the intestacy rules, it did not matter that Raymond and Deepa hadn't spoken in a decade, or that Winnie had built a life and a business with him. The estate, worth roughly $450,000 once the house equity, the truck and a modest savings account were added up — the landscaping business itself had little resale value beyond that equipment, its worth tied up in ongoing contracts rather than anything a balance sheet would capture — belonged in law to the siblings.

Someone still had to apply to the court to be formally appointed as the estate's representative, a role called an estate trustee, before any bank account could be accessed or any property transferred. Deepa applied for that appointment as next of kin. That gave her legal authority over the house Winnie was living in, the joint bank accounts tied to the business, and every decision about what happened next — even though she had never met Winnie and had no knowledge of how the business ran.

What we did

1. Identified the dependant's support claim. Ontario law does not leave common-law partners with nothing. The Succession Law Reform Act allows a person who was financially dependent on the deceased, including a common-law spouse who was being supported or was contributing to a shared household, to apply for support from the estate even though they are not an heir under the intestacy rules. We filed this claim promptly, because it is subject to a strict deadline after the estate trustee's appointment, and gathered the joint bank records, business filings and eleven years of shared expenses to support it.
2. Built the case for Winnie's ownership share separately from support. A dependant's support claim addresses need going forward, but it does not by itself recognize what someone contributed to property already. Winnie had put her own money and years of unpaid labour into growing the landscaping business and paying down the house. We advanced a parallel argument, grounded in the equitable principle against unjust enrichment, that Winnie was entitled to a share of the house and business reflecting her actual contribution, separate from anything she might receive as a dependant.
3. Opened direct negotiations with the estate trustee. Litigating both claims through to a full court decision would have taken well over a year and consumed a significant share of the estate in costs on both sides, since Deepa's own legal costs would ultimately be paid from estate funds too. We proposed a negotiated settlement early, before positions hardened, and laid out clearly what a court was likely to award if the matter went the distance.
4. Kept the business running during negotiations. Winnie needed clarity fast to keep paying staff and honouring existing landscaping contracts. We worked with the estate trustee's lawyer to authorize interim payments from the business accounts for payroll and supplier bills while the larger settlement was negotiated, so the business itself did not collapse before an agreement was reached.
5. Documented the final split in a signed estate settlement. Once terms were agreed, we had the agreement formalized and filed as part of the estate accounting, so the distribution was final and enforceable rather than an informal understanding that could unravel later.

The outcome

The parties settled rather than proceeding to a court hearing on either claim. Winnie received the house, valued at roughly $260,000 in equity, and the landscaping business and its equipment, reflecting both her ownership contribution and a dependant's support allowance recognizing her years of financial reliance on the household income. Deepa and her brother divided the remaining roughly $190,000 in savings and the value of the work truck, which was sold as part of settling the estate.

It was not an even split in Winnie's favour, and it was not the outcome she would have had if she and Raymond had simply been married or had wills in place. She spent several months in uncertainty, incurred legal costs neither of them would have needed to pay with basic estate planning documents, and shared an estate with a sister-in-law she had never met before the funeral. Deepa, for her part, accepted a smaller share than the intestacy rules technically gave her sibling's estate, in exchange for avoiding a drawn-out court process over a relationship she had no real stake in beyond the legal technicality of being next of kin.

The settlement also became the reason Winnie finally did her own estate planning. Once the estate was wound up, she came back to put a will, a power of attorney for property and a power of attorney for personal care in place for herself, naming a new common-law partner she had since started seeing and setting out exactly how she wanted the landscaping business handled if something happened to her. What had cost her months of stress and a share of the estate she should not have had to negotiate for became, in the end, the reason her own affairs would never leave the people she cared about in the same position.

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