Estate administration is the job of gathering the assets of the person deceased, paying the debts and distributing the estate to the persons entitled by will or the intestate succession legislation. Often the personal representative [PR] will be a family member who may have no previous experience of such a job and will also be dealing with the death of a family member at the same time. Surveys have found that the job of a [...]
This report makes a number of recommendations to reform the Wills Act. It recommends that Alberta courts be given the power to validate a will or an alteration, revocation or revival of a will even if it does not comply with the formalities prescribed by the Wills Act. It also recommends that the age of testamentary capacity remain the same as the age of majority (18 years) so that a minor cannot make a valid will. People [...]
This report considers the payment of a person's debts out of their estate after their death (at the time of publication). Over hundreds of years, a common law "order of application" had developed, that determined the order in which certain kinds of assets could be applied to pay off a debt, so that, for example, assets that were not given over as a gift to someone would be applied to pay off debts before those [...]
As addressed in the other reports in this series, Alberta law relating to the care of children (at the time of this report's publication) included a variety of statutory provisions that were out-dated, inconsistent, and/or had uncertain scope. For this reason, this report begins from a "clean slate" in trying to define (i) child guardianship, (ii) custody, and (iii) access, and to determine how these issues can be decided in order to protect the best [...]
This report was written to address five concerns about child support law at the time of its publication, viz.: the inadequacy of child support awarded; inconsistency of award between similar families; inefficiency in assessment; inequality based on "legitimacy" of birth; and unaddressed complexities based on the inter-relation between spousal support, custody of children, and child support. This report expounds recommendations for a new approach to child support, which is meant to foster equality for all [...]
At the time of publication, Alberta's law relating to spousal support after a divorce was unique in Canada, in that it incorporated the "fault doctrine." This doctrine holds that in order to obtain support, a spouse must prove that he or she is the "innocent party" in the divorce (i.e., not responsible for the marriage breakdown), and that the other spouse is culpable (i.e., responsible for the marriage breakdown). This report suggests the elimination of [...]
This report presents the criticisms of Family Law (as it stood at the time of publication) that led to the initiation of the Family Law project by the ALRI. Chief among these criticisms: much of Alberta family law is outdated; family Law is split up among several different pieces of legislation; different parts of Alberta family law are not consistent with each other; family law is controlled by numerous different bodies, with no central authority. [...]
At the time of publication, there was a contradiction in the law of Alberta regarding marital property. If a marriage dissolved, each spouse would be presumed to have contributed equally to the marriage (barring evidence to the contrary), and therefore to be entitled to an even share of the marital property, regardless of the name on title. On the other hand, if one spouse died before the other, he or she would have complete freedom [...]
A person who dies without a valid will is known as "intestate." The distribution of such a person's assets was (at the time of this report's publication) determined by the Intestate Succession Act, RSA 1980, c I-9. This Act was based on a system of property distribution developed in 1670 (the Statute of Distribution). This report asserts that this scheme of distribution was out of date, and that the will of those who died intestate could be [...]
