Choosing your attorney for property and personal care

An executor’s mistakes are audited by beneficiaries after the fact. An attorney operates on a living, vulnerable you — possibly for years, with nobody watching closely. It is the highest-trust appointment in your whole estate plan, and financial abuse by attorneys is the most common form of elder financial abuse in Canada. Choose with that sentence in mind.

The property attorney

The job: run your finances while you cannot. Pay bills, manage investments, deal with CRA, maintain or sell the house, fund your care.

What matters, in order: integrity (they will have near-total practical access), financial competence (not brilliance — diligence: files, receipts, deadlines), availability (local, and at a life stage with slack), and temperament under family pressure (they may have to tell a sibling that no, the cottage is being sold to fund the nursing home).

Attorneys are fiduciaries with legal duties — act in your best interest, keep records, keep your property separate — and all three provinces allow compensation, but enforcement while you are incapable depends on someone noticing. Structure beats hope:

The personal-care attorney

Different job, different virtues. This person consents to treatment, chooses care homes, and — at the end — carries your wishes about life-prolonging treatment into a room full of grief. Choose someone who can hold a line under emotional pressure, who lives close enough to show up at the hospital, and who genuinely knows what you want because you have told them.

Write the guidance down. Our questionnaire records your wishes on pain management and life-prolonging treatment and builds them into the document — vastly better than leaving your attorney to guess, and it takes the weight of the decision off them: they are executing your choice, not making theirs.

Patterns to avoid

• The eldest child by default. Pick for the job, not the birth order, and explain the choice while you are alive.
• Estranged co-attorneys “to be fair”. Joint attorneys who cannot cooperate produce deadlock at your bedside.
• Someone with money trouble. Not because good people cannot be broke — because you should not put an easy temptation next to a hard life.
• No backup. Your attorney can predecease you, decline, or lose capacity themselves. Every appointment in our documents has an alternate.

For large or contentious estates, trust companies act as attorney for property at a published fee — the same logic as a professional executor.