Are online wills legal in Canada?

Yes. A will you make online is as legally valid as one drafted in a law office, provided it is signed and witnessed according to your province’s rules.

The confusion usually comes from conflating two different questions: who is allowed to prepare a will, and how a will has to be executed. The first has no restrictions. The second has strict ones.

Nothing requires a lawyer

None of the three provinces we serve requires a will to be drafted, reviewed, notarised or witnessed by a lawyer.

Under Ontario’s Succession Law Reform Act, a will is valid if it is in writing, signed at the end by the testator, and that signature is made or acknowledged in the presence of two witnesses who then sign in the testator’s presence. The statute says nothing about who typed it.

British Columbia’s Wills, Estates and Succession Act and Alberta’s Wills and Succession Act set out equivalent requirements. Neither mentions lawyers as a condition of validity.

Notarisation is also not required for a will in any of these provinces. A separate document called an affidavit of execution — sworn by one of your witnesses — is sometimes prepared to make probate smoother, but it is not what makes the will valid.

What actually makes it valid

Four things, in every one of the three provinces:

1. Writing. Not a video, not a voice recording, not a text message.
2. Capacity and intention. You understood that you were making a will, understood roughly what you owned, and knew who had a claim on it.
3. Your signature, made freely.
4. Two witnesses, who watched you sign and then signed themselves, and who are not beneficiaries.

Where the provinces diverge

The two that matter most for online wills:

Witness age. Ontario and Alberta require witnesses to be 18. British Columbia requires 19. Using an 18-year-old witness in Vancouver is a genuine defect.

Electronic signing. This is the real difference between the provinces.

• British Columbia has recognised fully electronic wills since 1 December 2021 — created, signed and witnessed in electronic form and “electronic presence”. BC was first in Canada to allow this.
• Ontario permits remote witnessing over audio-visual technology, made permanent by the Accelerating Access to Justice Act, 2021, provided at least one witness is a licensee of the Law Society of Ontario. The will itself is still signed on paper in wet ink.
• Alberta does not permit electronic wills at all. The Wills and Succession Act is silent on them, so your Alberta will must be printed and signed in wet ink with two witnesses physically in the room.

This is why “you can make your whole will online” is true in BC and misleading in Alberta. We tell you which applies to you before you get to the signing step.

So what is the catch with online wills?

Not validity. The real limitation is judgement.

An online questionnaire is very good at applying rules — it will not let your residue percentages add up to 94%, and it will warn you when you name a beneficiary as a witness. It cannot tell you whether leaving your house to one child and cash to the other is going to cause a lawsuit, or whether a Henson trust would protect your disabled son’s benefits, or how to handle the condo you own in Florida.

For those, see a lawyer. Here is the full list of situations where you should.

What about wills made with AI?

A will drafted by a general-purpose chatbot carries a specific risk that a purpose-built platform does not: it has no province logic and no validation. It will confidently produce a document citing the wrong statute, the wrong witness age, or an intestacy figure from a different jurisdiction — and it will not check whether your percentages add up. If you use one, treat its output as a first draft to take to a professional, not as a will.

The bottom line

Online wills are legal. Make sure the platform you use knows which province you are in, and follow its signing instructions exactly. Execution is where wills fail, not drafting.