A Collingwood Widow's Rush to Sign Powers of Attorney Before a Trip

The situation

Thalia was 71, widowed for six years, and still drove a few shifts a week for a rideshare app to supplement her pension. She owned her Collingwood townhouse outright, held a modest set of savings and investment accounts, and had never gotten around to signing powers of attorney. A power of attorney is a document that lets someone else make decisions on your behalf if you are unable to make them yourself — one kind covers property and finances, another covers personal care, meaning health and living decisions. Most people put them off. Thalia put hers off until a nephew's wedding overseas landed on her calendar with a flight booked for ten days out.

She called Treadstone Law because her doctor had mentioned, almost in passing, that at her age it was worth having something in place before a long trip in case of a medical event abroad or a problem back home while she was unreachable. She had two adult children, Etienne and Rejean. Etienne worked as a transit operator and lived twenty minutes from her. Rejean lived several hours away and worked irregular hours. Both loved their mother. Neither trusted the other to manage her money alone.

The problem

On the first call, Thalia said she wanted "whoever makes sense" named as her attorney for property, and assumed her children would sort it out between themselves. They did not sort it out. Etienne felt he should be the one, since he was local and could get to the bank or the house on short notice. Rejean felt excluded by geography, not by capability, and worried that naming only Etienne would leave him unchecked — not because he doubted his brother's honesty, but because he had seen enough family estate disputes among friends to know that even honest people make decisions the other sibling would never have made, and by the time anyone finds out, the money is spent.

A continuing power of attorney for property can name one attorney, or more than one acting jointly (meaning every decision needs both signatures), or jointly and severally (meaning either can act alone, with the other free to act too). Naming two people to act jointly on everything sounds like the safe compromise, but it has a real cost: every bank transaction, every bill payment, every cheque needs both attorneys' signatures, which becomes unworkable if Thalia ever needed something handled quickly and only one child could be reached. Naming them jointly and severally solves the convenience problem but recreates exactly the risk Rejean was worried about — either one, acting alone, could empty an account or sell an asset without the other's knowledge.

There was also a second document to settle: the power of attorney for personal care, which governs decisions about medical treatment, housing and daily care if Thalia became incapable of making those decisions herself. The same tension applied there in a smaller way — a hospital in a crisis needs one clear point of contact, not two siblings debating by phone from different provinces.

With the flight nine days away, there was no time for a drawn-out family negotiation. There was time for one structured conversation.

What we did

1. Separated the two documents and treated them differently. For personal care, we recommended Etienne alone as primary attorney, with Rejean named as an alternate who would step in only if Etienne were unavailable or unwilling to act. Personal-care decisions in a crisis often need to be made within hours, at a hospital, by whoever is physically present and reachable — a joint requirement there tends to cause the exact kind of delay that puts a patient at risk. Rejean accepted this once it was framed as a practical necessity rather than a vote of confidence in one child over the other.
2. Built a hybrid structure for property. For the continuing power of attorney for property, we drafted a jointly and severally clause for day-to-day matters — paying bills, managing the accounts Thalia used for living expenses — but carved out a joint-consent requirement for anything above a set threshold and for specific major acts: selling or mortgaging the townhouse, closing or moving investment accounts, or making any gift or loan from Thalia's assets. Ordinary money moves on its own; anything that could materially change the estate needs both signatures.
3. Added a record-keeping obligation in plain terms. Ontario law already requires an attorney for property to keep accounts of what they do with a person's money, but that duty is often invisible to families until a dispute forces someone to ask for records. We put the expectation directly into the document's instructions and gave Thalia a simple explanation to pass to both sons: whichever of them acts, they keep receipts and a running log, and either sibling can ask to see it at any time without it being treated as an accusation.
4. Walked Thalia through capacity and revocation. We explained that signing these documents did not take away her own authority over her affairs while she remained capable — a power of attorney operates alongside her own decisions, not instead of them, and she could revoke or change it at any time as long as she remained capable of understanding what she was doing. This mattered to her; she had worried, without quite saying so, that signing something like this meant handing over control immediately.
5. Scheduled execution with a witness who was not a beneficiary. Ontario's rules for signing a power of attorney require witnesses who are not the attorney named in the document and not the attorney's spouse, among other restrictions, so we arranged independent witnessing rather than asking a family member to stand in. The documents were signed and properly witnessed four days before Thalia's flight.

The outcome

Neither son got exactly what he first asked for, and that was the point. Etienne did not get sole, unrestricted authority over his mother's roughly $60,000 in savings and investments plus her mortgage-free townhouse, together putting the estate's total value somewhere in the $120,000 to $300,000 range depending on the market. Rejean did not get an equal, joint say over every transaction, which would have made ordinary bill payment cumbersome from a distance. What they got instead was a structure where the everyday stuff moved without friction and the significant stuff required both of them to agree.

Thalia flew out on schedule with signed, witnessed copies of both documents in her carry-on and copies left with each son and with the firm. Nothing went wrong on the trip — no hospital call, no emergency — but she came back saying the arrangement had done something she had not expected: it gave her sons a reason to talk to each other about her affairs before there was a crisis forcing the conversation, rather than after. Etienne handled two routine bill payments while she was away, logged them as agreed, and sent Rejean a short note each time. It was not a dramatic use of the documents, but it was exactly the kind of low-stakes practice run that tests whether an arrangement will hold up when the stakes are higher.

The compromise cost something on both sides, which is usually the sign of a workable one. Etienne gave up the simplicity of acting entirely alone. Rejean gave up the reassurance of equal control over every transaction. What they kept was a mother who travelled without leaving a gap in her affairs, and a plan that did not ask either of them to trust the other completely or not at all.

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