In March of this year, I wrote about the complications which can
arise in administering an estate of an individual who owns a
vacation home in a U.S. state such as Florida or Arizona.
In that blog, I discussed issues in estate administration which
arise from the multi-jurisdictional location of assets and the
requirements to obtain probate in different places. Another type of
complication which can occur arises from the probate rules in other
jurisdictions and the ways they differ from, and are not compatible
with, the probate rules in Ontario.
In some cases, the complications will arise because the deceased
lived in or owned assets in a civil law jurisdiction, whereas
Ontario is a common law jurisdiction. Most Commonwealth
jurisdictions and states in the United States are common law
jurisdictions based on English common law. Many other
jurisdictions, including most European countries, and notably
Quebec, are civil law jurisdictions, originally based on Roman
