In the latest Beutel Goodman Speaker Series, our Private Client Group welcomed Corina Weigl, Partner and Co-leader, Private Client Service at Fasken LLP. In conversation with host Darren Bahadur, Vice President, Private Client Group, Corina discussed the complexities of powers of attorney.

This webinar was presented to Beutel Goodman private clients on May 28, 2025. The transcript following the replay is edited for clarity.

 

 

Note: Do not copy, distribute, sell or modify this transcript of a recorded discussion without the prior written consent of Beutel, Goodman & Company Ltd. All information in this webinar is as at the date of the recording and is subject to change without notice. The information in this transcript and recording is not intended, and should not be relied upon, to provide legal, financial, accounting, tax, investment or other advice.

 

Darren Bahadur: Welcome to the latest installment of the BG Speaker Series. My name is Darren Bahadur, Vice President in Beutel Goodman’s Private Client Group, and I’m joined by a very special guest, Corina Weigl from Fasken LLP. As background, Corina is a partner, co-leader of Private Client Services at Fasken, and one of the country’s leading practitioners in wills, estates, and family business planning. In addition, her focus on strategies designed to protect a client’s property, uniquely positions her to discuss power of attorney. So thank you, Corina, for joining us.

Corina Weigl: Thanks, Darren, for that lovely introduction. Darren, can you see the screen?

Darren Bahadur: I can. Maybe I’ll tee this up for you here. So, the topic of planning for the future is one that’s on the minds of many. Whether you’re heading into your golden years or are the children of aging parents, like myself, we both know that protecting one’s interests isn’t a straight line. There are different types of POAs, considerations for personal business assets, all the way to appointing the appropriate decision maker. I know we have a deck here that you’re going to walk our audience through. But before I pass on the baton, let me share a message from our legal department.

The information in this webinar is of general nature. Many factors unknown to us affect the applicability of any statement or comment that we make to our particular circumstances. It is not intended and should not be relied upon to provide legal financial, accounting, tax, investment, or other advice.

One last housekeeping note for the audience. There is a Q&A button at the bottom of your screen, so please feel free to ask any questions along the way. Corina, over to you.

Corina Weigl: That’s great. Thanks, Darren. I probably brought up the deck a little bit too soon, but I always want to make sure the tech is working, so that’s great. Before I start, I thought I would help frame the context for my comments today by speaking about a few statistics, and these statistics come from Stats Canada. And according to Stats Canada, by 2026, 20 % of Canadians will be over age 65, and by 2036, that stat will increase by 5%, so that 25% of Canadians will be over age 65. Another stat that I think is relevant for today, and again, according to Stats Canada, in 2017, at least 402,000 seniors, or 7.1% of the population over 65 at that time, was living with either dementia or some form of Alzheimer’s. And in a second set of statistics, again from 2017, is that 24.6% of all seniors aged 85 or over had some form of dementia or Alzheimer’s disease. The points to take from these two buckets of statistics are that Canadians are living longer, and with that, we are experiencing a larger proportion of seniors that are suffering from dementia and/or Alzheimer’s, and we can expect that what that will mean is a larger proportion of our population will not be able to look after their financial affairs or make medical decisions for themselves.

And so that takes us into the context of today’s presentation. If we step back for a moment to think about estate planning, we understand it as an exercise in identifying the goals for clients vis-à-vis their property and then designing a plan to achieve those goals. One of the common goals we see for clients and that we want to make sure is addressed is ensuring an efficient transition and management of property, both during your lifetime and then ultimately when you pass away. During your lifetime, the risk that we want to address is in terms of achieving that goal is loss of capacity and the inability to make financial decisions over your property. So that’s the goal that we’re trying to achieve during your lifetime. And the best way to achieve that goal is through a continuing power of attorney for property. Why? Because it provides an efficient and cost-effective transition of control and decision-making over your property in the event of your incapacity. While there are other alternatives to achieving this goal, such as different forms of trust or joint ownership of property, they also have challenges, and they are not as cost effective as the power of attorney for property.

So over the next 30 minutes or so, I’m going to dig in a little deeper into this concept of a continuing power of attorney for property. And how I want to do that is by addressing the bullets that are on this slide. What is a power of attorney? What kinds of powers of attorney are there? What happens if you don’t have a power of attorney? What can your attorney do for you in respect of your property? And can you limit the authority that they have? Who do you appoint as an attorney? And how should decision making of your attorneys be made if you appoint more than one? And then I’ll close out with some closing comments, and as Darren has said, we’ll take some questions at the end.

So let’s start then. What is a power of attorney? Essentially, it’s a written agreement that creates an agency relationship where one person called the grantor appoints another person called the attorney to make decisions for the grantor. The key here is that it is an agency relationship, it’s not a trust relationship, and it is not a form of joint or co-ownership of property. Ownership of assets stays with the grantor. It doesn’t get moved into the name of the attorney, and it doesn’t get moved into the joint names of the attorney and the grantor. The property always stays with the grantor. It’s theirs.

While the grantor is capable, the attorney would be acting on the grantor’s instructions. But when the grantor becomes incapable and the attorney continues to act and make decisions over their property, then the obligations of the attorney get elevated to be trustee-like and more fiduciary-like. That’s what the legal rules would say, but anecdotally, the challenge with attorneys for property in particular is that they’re treated more informally and people don’t necessarily understand that at the point they start acting for an incapable grantor, they actually do become fiduciary-like and hold greater obligations. The ability to appoint an agent to make decisions, particularly over your property, isn’t new. You might have had to go on vacation or while you’re on vacation, somebody had to close a house transaction for you. Certainly, I have experienced that in recent years. We’ve always been able to give somebody the authority to close property transactions for us. What is new is that a few years ago, a statute was implemented called the Substitute Decisions Act that created two profound amendments.

The first was it could allow you as a client to appoint an attorney to be able to continue to act on your incapacity and make decisions for you in the event of your incapacity. That was a new thing. The second thing it did was allow you to give somebody the ability to consent to medical treatment decisions or personal care decisions in the event of your incapacity. That also didn’t exist prior to the implementation of this statute. The focus, again, today is going to be on the property side of things. But the one point I want you to take away from this slide is the two powers of attorney actually need to interact together. Why is that? Because the person who may be charged with making personal care decisions, like when it’s time to go into palliative care or a nursing home, they’re going to need money to actually support those decisions. And so they’re going to have to be able to interact with the person who has control over your financial arrangements. So it is important to think about the two different types of authority together. When you create a power of attorney for property, it’s possible to create what is called a springing attorney. What does that mean? It means you’ve imposed a condition that says when the attorney’s authority start, and the most common condition clients think about imposing is to say that the attorney can only start acting when the client becomes incapable. That makes sense, right? That’s the whole point of these documents. You want somebody to be able to make decisions when you’re incapable. So if you create that condition in the document, that means the agent’s authority, the attorney’s authority, will only spring into existence when you become incapable.

The other type of power of attorney is one that is live from the date you sign it. In other words, you sign a continuing power of attorney today, appointing your spouse or your child, they can theoretically start to act from the date that you sign it. There are pros and cons of both approaches. In our office, we use the latter approach, the live approach. The reason we use the live approach versus the one that is conditional on your incapacity is because the whole point of this type of document is to allow for an efficient transfer of authority in the event of incapacity. And if you impose a condition, then when the event actually happens, your attorneys will have to go off and actually satisfy the condition before Beutel for example, will allow the attorney to step in and start to make decisions, or before your bank will allow the attorney to start to step in and make decisions.

So you’re adding a layer of process, cost, and delay, which can create some risk in terms of the management of your financial affairs. What’s the downside of the live version? Well, the downside is that your named attorney gets the original documents and they can go off and start acting on your behalf. You may not know it, and you’re not incapable. We think the risk of that is pretty low, and we manage that risk by arrangements to keep the originals in the control with our firm, for example, or give instructions to the client about how they should keep control over the originals and release them at the appropriate time. The other aspect of powers of attorneys, and particularly what you would want to do as part of your estate plan, is to make sure the document is what’s called a continuing power of attorney for property. And that is that special creature that came into being when that new statute was implemented a number of years ago. The word continuing means the attorney’s authority can keep on going after you become incapable. If it doesn’t have that expressed statement that the document is to continue to operate post your incapacity, then it won’t operate and the attorney’s authority will end.

So you definitely want to make sure it’s a continuing power of attorney for property. So what’s the upshot here? To ensure an efficient transition to your named attorney, you want to think carefully before you make it conditional on your incapacity. But to be absolutely sure that your attorney can actually continue to ask if you become incapable, you want to state that it is a continuing power of attorney.

So what happens if you don’t have one of these documents? What does that mean? Well, it means that if you become incapable, you will not have anybody who has decision-making authority to sign checks, to pay bills, to close transactions, all of those day-to-day things. There won’t be anybody who will be able to do that. Nobody will have authority or control over your property. So if you are a sole shareholder, sole director, sole officer of a business that you own, and maybe it’s an investment corporation where your investment holdings are in, no one will have the authority to vote your shares, to replace the board, to replace you as a director, and replace you as a signing officer, which means no one will be able to transact corporate transactions after you become incapable.

So what’s the risk of that? It could be business continuity issues if you actually are operating an active business. It could be lost in the value of your assets if the market is experiencing a quick decline because nobody can give instructions as to what’s to happen with your investment. How would your family have to deal with this to get somebody in place to actually make decisions? They would have to go to court, bring a court application, to have a guardian appointed by the court. That’s a process, the rules of which are outlined in that statute I spoke about. There are prescribed documents that need to be completed, including a management plan. All of that will take time. It will cost money because you’ll typically have to involve lawyers in that process to bring that application. Most importantly, it will undoubtedly wreak emotional havoc on your family and cause them more stress than they’re already under because of your incapacity. So having some kind of mechanism to ensure somebody can make decisions over your financial affairs is important as part of your overall estate plan. Some other practical considerations. Can Beutel, for example, continue to act after you’re incapable, and what would happen in the event of your incapacity?

Well, that would depend upon the contractual terms of your relationship with Beutel. It may be, in fact, that they do have discretionary authority where they can continue to make decisions, but at some point, they will want to engage with your attorney for property, and if you don’t have one, they’ll want to engage with a court-appointed guardian to get instructions from that person about what is to happen with your investment strategy that they’re employing on your behalf. Related to that is that person will then interact with Beutel to review the strategy, and they may think it’s not an appropriate strategy for somebody who’s now incapable and whose assets now need to be sufficient to look after their needs and their dependents’ needs for the rest of their life if the capacity is one that’s going to be permanent. So the attorney or the guardian might actually reevaluate the strategy and augment it and potentially implement a more conservative strategy.

So hopefully by now, there’s an appreciation, you should have one of these documents in place. But what is it exactly that the attorney can do? Again, we go back to that statute because it says what the scope of authority of an attorney is under these documents or a guardian of property. In essence, unless you impose conditions in the power of attorney document, your named attorney can basically do anything you can do with your property, except they can’t make a new will for you. Now, that phrase, make a will, is subject to some interpretation, but the general view about what it means is your attorneys for property can’t engage in transactions that are really testamentary dispositions, that are really intended to impact what happens to your property after you die.

So what does that practically mean? Well, your attorneys couldn’t implement a beneficiary designation, for example, for your RRSPs or your life insurance. They couldn’t change a beneficiary designation that you already have in place. They couldn’t change joint ownership arrangements where there’s a right of survivorship attached to it. So there are some limits on what the attorney can do. There is one exception here, though. We all likely appreciate that when we reach a certain age, we have to convert our RRSP to a RRIF, a Registered Retirement Income Fund. And while the law isn’t necessarily settled on this point, the practical approach financial institutions take is, if an attorney is implementing that conversion from an RRSP to a RIF, they will allow the attorney to maintain the same beneficiary designation that was in place for the RSP for the RIF because it isn’t a change to what’s going to happen when you die.

So that is something that most financial institutions will allow an attorney to do. Can you impose limits on what your attorney can do? Yes you can. So if there’s things that you don’t want them to do or you want them to do in a certain way with respect to your property, you can deal with that by customizing the document. And you can actually have more than one continuing power of attorney for property. So what does that mean? It means you can segregate your property into different buckets and appoint different attorneys to have control over those different buckets depending upon the type of property. And the most common segregation is between personal assets like your bank account, your personal real estate, RSPs, life insurance, non-registered accounts, and then from your business assets. And I’ll come back to your business asset as to why you might want to think about creating a separate power of attorney over your business assets.

I want to dig a little bit deeper, though, into what your attorneys can do. A moment ago, I said they can do anything, and that is the case. But the statute does impose some parameters on certain types of transactions because those types of transactions have an element of potential for self-dealing. And the categories are gifts and loans to family members, and then there is a limit on charitable donations your attorney can make. On gifts and loans to family and friends, your attorney for property can continue to make gifts or provide loans to family and friends, but they have to be able to reach the conclusion that it is consistent with what you would have done prior to your incapacity. That’s not to say that you have to have written evidence to support the fact the attorneys can rely upon a pattern of behavior that you demonstrated before your incapacity to continue to be able to make gifts and loans. So for example, if you historically make birthday gifts to grandkids, your attorneys can continue to make birthday gifts to grandkids. But why is this a special carve-out? Why does the law feel the need to carve out gifts and loans to family and friends? Well, because there’s a recognition that more often than not, it’s going to be family who occupies these roles. And there’s an element of self-dealing in the ability to make gifts to family, because if you’re a family member who’s occupying the role of attorney, the question will be raised, could you continue to make gifts to yourself in the event you’re the one who’s acting?

And the answer is yes, because the law has expressly carved it out. And so long as there is an intention that was happening before the grantor was incapable, the attorney can continue to do it. I have to say, though, that all of these things, gifts and loans, this is one of the powers of an attorney that causes the most challenge, vis-à-vis the other family members, and I’m sure you can appreciate why that is the case.

The other point that I want to make here is about gifts of specific property that you might have in your will. If in your will, you say you want your cottage property to go to your daughter’s Susie, and your son, Johnny, is your named attorney, Johnny should be reviewing the terms of your will to look to see if there are any specific gifts in it. And if there are, then Johnny needs to make sure that he doesn’t actually sell or give away the cottage while he’s acting for you because he will be defeating that testamentary gift in your will. And if Johnny does that, then Susie will have a first charge on the assets of your estate when you die to get a cash gift equal to the value of the cottage that Johnny disposed of.

So what does that all mean? It means that your attorney needs to look at your will, see if there are any specific gifts, and needs to avoid giving those away or selling them unless it’s absolutely necessary for your needs to meet your needs during your lifetime because you had an intention to give away that particular property when you died.

All right, the other point that I wanted to make before I get on to speaking just a moment about termination here is, hopefully it’s clear why you need an attorney to step in and make a decision. And hopefully it’s also clear that ultimately the person you name really needs to be somebody you trust and somebody who can make decisions in your best interests. And I’ll come back to options about who. But I want to speak a little bit about some anecdotal observations from being in this practice for longer than a fairly long time, 25 years plus. And it’s coming back to something I said at the start. These powers of attorneys, they’re pretty informal arrangements. People don’t see acting under a power of attorney as quite as stringent as they might if they were actually acting as a trustee under a trust document. And maybe that’s because the word trust actually has a higher strength in terms of what we should be doing.

So the challenge we have in practice is, attorneys often start acting for their incapable parents, but they never often get advice about what they should be doing, what they shouldn’t be doing, what’s their authority, what are their responsibilities. They just start acting. Coupled with that is, because it’s informal, and then you layer on to the fact there is no public oversight of attorneys acting for incapable persons, which means you do need to trust the people you appoint to do a good job. There is potential oversight because other family members who aren’t the named attorney can hold the attorney accountable for how they are making decisions on your behalf. There is that level of accountability. But when you bring these three things together, there is room for mismanagement by attorneys, and there is certainly room for abuse. And the law related to challenges to what attorneys are doing is actually on the rise because they’re treated more informally. We are now talking to our clients about implementing a step the attorney has to go through before we actually release the original powers of attorney to the named attorneys.

And that is an obligation that they sit down with us and get advice about the do’s and don’ts. And that is directed by our clients as part of the mechanism for us actually handing over the power of attorney document. So there’s a sign-off that we’ve actually advised the attorney on what they should and shouldn’t be doing. And that might be a little bit of paternalism, but I think it’s worth thinking about at the end of the day in terms of implementing.

The point I wanted to make about terminating an attorney’s authority, because sometimes people don’t appreciate this, and coming back to those statistics at the beginning, we’re living longer, and so we may be living longer with dementia or Alzheimer’s, for example, which means that people we name to take on this role of acting as our attorney could be in the job for a very long period of time. That job will exist until the date that you die. At that point in time, the executor under your valid will steps in. So it’s the attorney who has control up to the date of death, and then it’s your executors that step in.

Sometimes, if you’ve got a lot of different people you can think about appointing for these jobs, It’s good to have a check and balance where you name somebody as your attorney during your lifetime and then potentially somebody else as your executor so they can review what the attorney has done and make sure everything was dealt with tickety boo.

The other point I wanted to make about termination from this slide is, because there is an ability to have multiple powers of attorney at the same time, it’s important to make sure that if you are in a scenario where you’re redoing powers of attorney, that it’s absolutely clear which is the most recent, which is the most valid one, to avoid a scenario where you’ve got dueling powers of attorney out there with competing authorities. And that really is the job of your solicitor to make sure that it’s absolutely clear who has the authority at any given moment in time, so there isn’t any confusion. Why do I speak about this? Because it’s not uncommon. It’s actually quite common for banks to ask clients to sign bank powers of attorney over accounts. That power of attorney will be limited to the bank account that you sign with the financial institution.

The problem is, if you have already done as part of your estate plan an overall continuing power of attorney for property, you may now be having a scenario where your bank power of attorney doesn’t match your overall continuing power of attorney, and so you’ve got confusion as to who actually has authority over that bank account. So you want to be cautious about bank power of attorney and make sure that they actually dovetail with your overall continuing power of attorney.

Can you limit an agent your attorney’s authority? So I want to talk now about the comment that I made earlier, that you can create different powers of attorney over different buckets of property, and specifically one over your personal asset and potentially another over your business assets. First, what are your business assets? Clients often think that if they own a business that they run, that they own all of the assets. And that’s partly correct and partly not. Your company is a separate legal entity from you. It may own assets, it may have employees, creditors, suppliers. You don’t own those assets and you don’t own those stakeholder relationships.

The property you own are shares in the company. Those shares will have rights that are detailed in the articles of incorporation for the company. Common rights that are attached to shares are a right to receive a dividend declared by the board, a right to a fixed redemption amount, a right to the net asset on a winding up, which is common for common shares or equity shares. Most importantly, a right to vote who is going to be a board member. It’s the board then that decides the strategic direction of the company, and it’s the board that decides corporate distributions like dividends that are to be paid to shareholders. So if you are in a situation where you are a sole shareholder, sole director, sole officer, those legal niceties often get blurred, but they are legal niceties that need to be respected, particularly in the event of incapacity. If you become incapable and you have a single power of attorney naming a single attorney to take control over your assets. That person will take control over your voting shares. They will then be asked to appoint new directors because if you become incapable, you will cease to be a director. And then the attorney, if they have used those voting rights to appoint themselves, will have the ability to make corporate decisions for you.

So another point that I want to make before I talk about the pros and cons of segregating assets, particularly business assets with a separate attorney, is, another type of asset you may own in the business context are shareholder loans that the company owes to you. For some businesses, the right to call that shareholder loan immediately might pose challenges for the ongoing operations of the business. And so that may be another asset that you want to segregate off and have in the control of somebody who actually understands the business and understands the need not to demand payment too soon. And the last point that I want to make from this slide is, and it’s a point that often isn’t entirely understood, and that is that when you become incapable, or if you become incapable, any fiduciary roles that you have, directorships, officerships, or trusteeships, they all cease. Those roles do not carry on into the hands of your attorney for property just because they’re appointed your attorney. It may be, as I say, that the attorney who takes control of voting shares then has the right to elect the board member and they elect themselves.

But they do not step into your directorship roles because they were appointed your attorney. They actually have to use the voting rights attached to your shares. So the pros and cons of doing this bifurcation with business assets. Why would you do it? It allows you to do an assessment of the nature of your business. If it’s an investment holding company, you may not care if the person who’s making the investment decisions for your company is the same, your investment holding company, is the same as the person who is making investment decisions for your RRSPs or your TFSA. So you might not need to segregate it then. But if your business is an operating business where there are going to be particular skillsets needed at the board to actually give the strategic guidance, maybe you do want to have somebody else appointed to take over control of the voting shares you own in that business. There might be agreements in place, like you might have pledged your share as security for a financing arrangement, and those agreements might limit who can actually be appointed to the board. And so you might want to look at those agreements and then dovetail that with a separate business power of attorney.

And then you might have other third-party arrangements where other stakeholders, suppliers, creditors, or just the nature of business may not be appropriate to have a family member step in to control the business such that it might make sense to have somebody else, again, step into your voting share versus your personal property.

The cons. This is another document to think about in your planning process. It’s a document that will need greater customization than a power of attorney over all of your other personal property. If you have separate powers of attorney for your personal property versus your business property, you’re going to want to make sure that people can work together because they will have to interact in terms of some aspects of their decision making.

Coming then to structuring the continuing power of attorney. The first decision, who to appoint, and then how do they make decisions. The who to appoint is always a challenging conversation. The options are family members, your spouse, your adult kids, friends, trusted advisors, a corporate trustee. Those are all good options to think about in terms of who to take on this role. But there are pros and cons of each of those options.

And the key points to really think about are, fundamentally, again, it needs to be somebody you trust, somebody who can take on this role for a longer period of time because it could be a role that exists for a long period of time, somebody who’s going to put your interests ahead of their own because they’re managing the property for you while you’re alive. This isn’t an executorship. You’re actually still here. And so the decisions they make could have profound implications on how your finances benefit you and your family members. You want to think about the time, it is a job, the time that it will take and pose on somebody to do the job. You want to think about how they will be perceived by other family members. Is the person you’re thinking about naming going to actually be able to practically do the job, or are they always going to be in a tussle with other family members that is really going to impede their ability to act? Because family members can be quite challenging once parents become incapable in terms of how an attorney for property actually looks after financial affairs.

And lastly, and this might sound trite, you want to think about how you want to live your life financially. I’m going to give you an example. Again, it may sound trite, but it’s an example that comes from experience. I now have clients who actually give written directions in their power of attorney for things like getting their hair done on a weekly basis, going to get their nails done on a bi-weekly basis. It may sound trite. Unfortunately, I’ve seen scenarios Those were family members, where mom, in particular in this example, she’s incapable. She won’t know whether she’s gotten her hair done anymore or her nails done anymore. So why are we spending the money on it? Even in the context of the mom having multis of millions of dollars available to do that. And so you want to think about how are the people that you’re thinking about naming actually going to act? Are they going to look after your best interests or are they going to think about their own interests when the estate falls in and they’re the beneficiaries of your estate? So it is a critical document that I think we don’t spend enough time on. Decision making. If you name one attorney, it’s easy. They’re the sole decision maker. But if you name more than one, the law says they have to make decisions jointly.

So our standard protocol is, if we name three or more, we include a clause that says the act by majority decision. So there’s a built-in mechanism. And we have a conversation about picking the right three people where there’s always going to be somebody who can potentially side with one or the other in the event there’s a split between two of the three. We do try to avoid appointing two attorneys because if there isn’t, unless we’re confident they’re going to be able to act, and that requires a bit of a frank conversation, because you can’t build in a decision making auditor in the power of attorney document unless you are actually appointing that third person to resolve a deadlock as an attorney. And that’s because of some technical requirements about the fact this is an agency relationship. So if you’re naming two, you can’t say in the document that in the event of a deadlock, it should go to arbitration to resolve, for example, you’d actually need to then say, In the event of a deadlock, I appoint a third attorney, and that third attorney has the responsibility to actually make the decision. I dissuade clients from that because if you’re going down that path, if I’m that third attorney, I’m probably not going to actually want to come in and arbitrate that decision because there’s probably a fair degree of risk from it.

I’m probably going to prefer to be at the table right from the get-go. And so we would try to move people to a three-port person appointment in that context. Some last comments. Other things to think about in terms of structuring the document: compensation for doing the job. If you don’t say anything in the document, the law does allow attorneys for property to be compensated, and it’s a percentage formula approach. I won’t get into the details. I will say that if you have a large estate, the percentage approach is probably going to be too much. So other options are hourly, or you think about what the job is going to entail and you provide for a yearly stipend, much like the way directors are compensated for the director role. Indemnification in the event the attorneys are sued by a family member who’s disgruntled with what they did. And the point there is to make it clear that in the event there is a claim brought where the attorneys need to defend themselves, they can use your assets to defend themselves. If it turns out that they actually were negligent or worse, they will have to repay the funds into the estate.

But the point is you want them to be able to defend themselves until that court matter has actually been resolved in a negative fashion. Other points, you want to be clear that attorneys can get advice about what they should be doing and actually encourage them to get advice. You want to make it clear that if they need help, they should get help because, again, this job could be a long job and it could be tough. We also encourage attorneys to maintain appropriate accounting records and financial records of their decisions. And we do that because we think it helps them to appreciate that their role is really more trustee-like, particularly once they started acting for an incapable client. The last point I want to say here, before I hand it over to Darren to see what questions we have is. Remember, you are Beutel’s client. When an attorney named in a continuing power of attorney shows up to say that you’re not able to make decisions, Beutel is going to have some process to go through before they simply hand over control of your affairs, your financial affairs that they’re managing with you right now to that named attorney.

That process may take time to go through, and it may depend on the facts. If the scenario is your capacity is slipping, so it’s not absolutely clear that you’re incapable, the process may take a little bit more time. If it’s a situation where it’s absolutely clear that you’re incapable, you’ve been hit by the proverbial bus and you’re in a coma, Beutel’s process might be a little bit more quickly. The point here is there is a process that your attorneys have to go through before it gets activated with all financial institutions, and that is designed to protect you because you still are the client. Somebody else is just now making decisions on your behalf. And so before, Beutel or the banks hand over the keys to the bank, they want to make sure that it’s an appropriate set of circumstances for the attorney to start acting. And so with that, Darren, I think I’ll hand it over.

Darren Bahadur: Thank you for that. I mean, it’s been so much material. I mean, it’s obviously dense and a lot to absorb there, but some careful considerations. We had one question, I’m paraphrasing a little bit, and it’s somewhat situational. In a situation where there’s a single appointed POA and the grantor is incapable, if that POA wants to step down, they no longer want that responsibility with no alternative POA designated, how does that situation play out?

Corina Weigl: Yeah, the statute does detail what the attorney needs to do. You can actually resign. You have to give notice to all the third parties that you’ve interacted with that you are stepping down. We would likely say, look, that’s great, you want to step down, but there is no named alternate. Let’s bring a concurrent guardianship application at the same time so that your step down is concurrent with somebody actually legally being appointed.

Darren Bahadur: I think we all know how uncomfortable the topic this is to broach. I think your presentation, I’m sure, is going to, one, stir a lot of questions, have some reevaluate existing arrangements and just potentially get the ball rolling in terms of drafting a new POA. So thank you for that, Corina. For anyone in the audience, if you have any questions on today’s presentation, please contact your Buetel Goodman representative, and they’d be more than happy to follow up with you directly. You can also visit our website, www.beutelgoodman.com, where you’ll find a library of white papers, inside articles, and previously recorded webinars on a variety of topics. Thank you for joining us today.

 

Related Topics and Links of Interests

• • Beutel Goodman Speaker Series: Cybersecurity in the Age of AI

 

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