Category: Blog

One of the issues in wealth advising and planning is the regulation of those who provide financial product sales advice and financial planning services—often offered under the nomenclature of estate planning or retirement planning advice. A lot has happened recently in many jurisdictions, including Canada and the U.S., as regulators

It was heartbreaking to learn that Jean Truchon, who fought so valiantly to expand assisted-dying laws in Canada, felt forced to advance his medically assisted death procedure from June 2020 to early April. He chose to do so because of the COVID-19 pandemic and his inability to spend time with

In my blog distributed to you on April 7, 2020, I told readers to stay tuned as hundreds of years of strict formalities might soon change due to Covid-19. But little did I know that these changes would come later that very day in two jurisdictions: my home province of Ontario

Executing estate planning documents during a global pandemic is a problem facing lawyers throughout many parts of the world. Traditional formalities for wills and powers of attorney are stricter than for most legal documents. In Ontario and many common law jurisdictions, the law requires a will to be in writing and

Alter Ego Trusts (“AETs”) and Joint Partner Trusts (“JPTs”) are effective tools to assist in probate and incapacity planning. AETs and JPTs are inter vivos trusts (meaning they are set up during a person’s lifetime), to which persons 65 years or older can transfer assets on a tax-deferred basis. An

With an aging population, and the trillion dollar transfer of wealth to occur in the face of a shrinking income tax base, and in the face of what some assert is an increasing concentration of wealth at the top, the burning question is whether new forms of death taxes will

In early February, I had the opportunity and pleasure of participating in a panel discussion of lawyers from several jurisdictions, including the U.S., Mexico, and Italy, at an international legal conference on the interesting topic “Inheritance Tax – Should More Countries Implement It?”. We discussed and compared how our different

Statistics tell us that the number of U.S. citizens who expatriated from, or renounced, their U.S. citizenship has risen dramatically in the past few years. A big part of this rise has to do with increasingly onerous U.S. income tax filing and reporting obligations, combined with scrutiny of foreign accounts