You can’t disinherit an adult child on a whim: the Supreme Court of British Columbia ruled that, absent a valid reason for cutting a child out of a will, there’s still a moral obligation to provide for them.
In a recent decision, the court overruled the terms of a man’s will that disinherited his daughter and left the vast majority of his estate to his only other child, his son.
According to the court’s decision, when Danial Alan Dancey died in January 2024, leaving an estate worth approximately $1.8 million, the latest version of his will left $10,000 to his ex-wife, $1,000 to each of his three grandchildren, and the rest of the estate to his son, Jeffery — effectively disinheriting his only other child, Kristin, who is the mother of his three grandchildren.
“As Dan set out in the will, he disinherited Kristin because he believed that she had chosen to estrange herself from him for approximately ten years,” the court noted.
The daughter sued her brother personally, and in his role as executor of their father’s estate, arguing that her late father failed to fulfill a moral obligation to provide for her in his will, that he had no reason to leave her out of the will, and that they had reconciled in mid-2023.
According to the court, the son maintained that the will should stand, and argued their father had just cause to leave his daughter out of his will.
Ultimately, the court sided with the daughter, finding that she was unjustly left out of her father’s will. It exercised its discretion to vary the terms of the will to provide her with an “adequate, just and equitable” share of the estate.
While the court noted that there was evidence that Dancey and his daughter had reconciled by the time of his death, even if they hadn’t repaired their relationship, “the weight of the evidence supports the conclusion that the estrangement was not caused by Kristin and, therefore, cannot constitute just cause to disinherit her,” the court said.
Instead, it found that the father was the source of their estrangement — as he was angry about her divorce, which the court found was “not a valid and [rational] reason to disinherit her.”
Indeed, the court noted that Dancey revised his will several times in response to the shifting state of family relationships, and demonstrated “a pattern of reflecting these estrangements in his estate planning.”
For instance, the court noted that he cut his ex-wife out of his first will in 2011, but added her when they became more friendly. Then in 2015, he changed his will, reducing his daughter’s share of the estate to 1% from 50%. And, in 2020, he revised it again, leaving 20% to his son, 20% to each of his grandchildren, 19% to a friend, and 1% to his daughter. The final will, made in 2022 — which is the one being contested — reduced her share to zero.
Ultimately, the court found that Dancey didn’t make adequate provision for his daughter in his will, and that he didn’t “act as a judicious testator because his reasons for disinheriting her are not defensible.”
Additionally, the court also found that the daughter’s “precarious” financial circumstances weighed in favour of varying the terms of the will. And that, while the son has his own financial challenges, “his financial need does not translate into a higher moral claim to the estate than [his sister],” it said.
The court ruled that the son was entitled to a larger share, given the care that he provided to his father in the final years of his life, and it decided to alter the will so that 45% goes to the daughter, 55% to the son.