No Will, Two Kids: An Intestate Estate in Mississauga

The situation

Raymond was 34 and worked as a factory technician on a shift line in Mississauga. He collapsed at work on an ordinary Tuesday and did not survive the ambulance ride. He left behind his wife Harpreet, a retail worker at a big-box store, and two children under ten. Like most people their age, they had never gotten around to writing wills. They owned a townhouse with a mortgage, a joint chequing account, Raymond's workplace pension death benefit, and a car. Between the home's equity in a Mississauga market that had risen steadily since they bought, the pension benefit, and their savings, the total estate value, once the mortgage and debts were accounted for, came to roughly $260,000.

Harpreet assumed, reasonably, that as Raymond's wife everything would simply come to her. That is how many people picture it, and a well-meaning friend warned her it might not be true — that in Ontario, some of it could be locked away for the children instead. Both instincts turned out to be only partly right. What actually happens depends on a rule almost no one has heard of until they need it.

What the intestacy rules actually said

When a person dies without a valid will in Ontario, they are said to have died 'intestate,' and the Succession Law Reform Act supplies a fixed distribution scheme in place of one. It does not ask what the deceased would have wanted. It applies the same formula to every family in the same shape, and the formula turns on a single number: the preferential share.

A surviving spouse is entitled to the preferential share — currently $350,000, a figure fixed by regulation and raised from $200,000 as recently as March 2021 — before anything else is divided. Only once the estate is worth more than that amount does a remainder exist to split between the spouse and any children, with the children's portions held in trust until they reach adulthood. If the estate is worth less than the preferential share, as Raymond and Harpreet's was, the formula does something most people do not expect: the spouse takes the whole thing, and the children are not entitled to anything under the intestacy rules at all.

That is what happened here. Once the mortgage was paid out and the sale costs and other debts were subtracted, the net estate came to roughly $260,000 — comfortably under the $350,000 threshold. Under the formula, all of it belonged to Harpreet. The two children, despite being Raymond's heirs in every ordinary sense of the word, had no legal claim on any of it, because the preferential share absorbed the entire estate before the formula ever reached the step where children take a share.

Harpreet found this almost as disorienting as the opposite outcome would have been. She had braced herself, on a friend's warning, for a chunk of the estate to be locked away for the children until they turned eighteen. Instead she learned that whether that happens at all turns on a dollar threshold most people have never heard of — one the province has changed before and can change again — and that a family with a slightly larger home, a bit more savings, or an extra insurance policy through work could have landed on the other side of that line with no more planning than Raymond and Harpreet had done. Nothing about their own choices, or lack of them, controlled which side they fell on.

There was a second complication, unaffected by the estate's size either way. Raymond's mother, Fiona, had assumed that as his parent she would also be entitled to something — she had helped raise him and felt she had a claim. Under the intestacy formula, a surviving spouse and children take the entire estate between them, in whatever proportion the preferential share produces; parents and siblings only inherit if there is no surviving spouse or descendant. Fiona was entitled to nothing from the estate, and having to explain that to her, on top of everything else, fell to Harpreet in the middle of her grief.

What we did

1. Applied for a certificate of appointment of estate trustee without a will. Because Raymond left no will naming an executor, Harpreet had no automatic authority to deal with his assets, close accounts, or sell the car. We prepared and filed the application to the Superior Court to have her formally appointed as estate trustee, which gives an administrator the same legal authority a named executor would have had.
2. Arranged the required administration bond. When someone dies without a will, the court generally requires the estate trustee to post a bond — an insurance-backed guarantee that protects the estate and anyone with a claim against it if the trustee mismanages the assets before the sale and final accounting are complete. A will can usually let the court waive this requirement outright by saying the named executor need not post security; on an intestacy the court can occasionally dispense with a bond too, but only on its own application with the consent of every adult beneficiary, and it is far from automatic. We arranged the bond through a surety provider, which added a cost the estate had to absorb and a delay of several weeks while it was underwritten.
3. Calculated the preferential share against the actual estate value, and documented it. Getting this arithmetic wrong is one of the most common errors in intestate estates, and it exposes the trustee personally if beneficiaries are overpaid or underpaid. We worked through the formula against the real asset values — the townhouse equity after the mortgage and sale costs, the pension death benefit, and the bank accounts — and confirmed that the net estate fell under the $350,000 preferential share threshold, meaning Harpreet was entitled to the entire estate and there was no remainder for the children to share. We put that calculation in writing for the court file, because a different appraised value or an asset no one had accounted for could have changed the answer, and the estate needed a clear record showing the number had been checked rather than assumed.
4. Closed out the accounts and finalized the distribution. Once debts, funeral costs, the bond premium, and legal costs were paid, we transferred the car into Harpreet's name, closed the joint chequing account through the estate and released the balance to her, and confirmed the pension death benefit had been collected and accounted for. We also prepared a simple written summary for Harpreet's own records — what came in, what was paid out, and what she received — even though no other beneficiary could compel one, because a clear record protects her if anyone, including Fiona, ever asks.
5. Explained the outcome to Fiona in writing. To head off a dispute born of confusion rather than any real legal claim, we set out plainly, with reference to the statutory scheme, why a surviving spouse and children exclude a parent from an intestate estate. Fiona did not contest it once she understood the rule applied the same way to every family, not just theirs.

The outcome

The estate was settled correctly and without a court dispute, and every dollar of it ultimately belonged to Harpreet. That is the good news the intestacy formula happened to produce here — but 'happened to' is doing real work in that sentence. Because the net estate fell under the $350,000 preferential share, none of it was diverted into a trust for the children; had the house been worth $100,000 more, or had Raymond carried a larger life insurance policy through his job, a real portion could easily have been locked away for two children until they turned eighteen, with Harpreet needing to justify any withdrawal beyond documented, itemized needs. Nothing the family did, or failed to do, controlled which side of that line they landed on.

What the absence of a will did cost, reliably and regardless of the estate's size, was time and money to get there. The bond premium ran to several thousand dollars, an expense a will would very likely have let the court waive entirely, since a named executor can usually be excused from posting one. The court process to be appointed estate trustee took a couple of months longer than probating a straightforward will naming Harpreet as executor would have, and for that whole stretch she had no legal authority to touch most of the accounts, pay the mortgage from estate funds, or sell the car — she covered the gap from her own dwindling savings while waiting for the court to formally recognize what the law, in the end, already said was hers.

None of that delay or expense can be undone now. What could be controlled was making sure the process that followed was handled correctly, on time, and without adding avoidable legal costs on top of an already difficult year — and that part went as well as it could. A will would not have changed how much Harpreet ultimately received. It would have let her receive it faster, more cheaply, and without months of financial strain in between.

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