People die without wills for the simplest of reasons.

Most wait for a sign of mortality: aging and sickness.

Some refuse to admit the inevitability of death.

Still others, by marriage or divorce, unwittingly revoke earlier wills.

In all such instances, the province of Ontario provides a scheme of distribution. 

Ontario’s universal will merits review:

A surviving spouse can administer an estate in preference to next-of-kin or another interested person. Estate debts must be paid. Funeral homes have the first right to claim payment for the obvious public benefit of dispatching remains. Claims of secured and unsecured creditors follow.

Dependants can demand special payments from estate assets. Dependants may be any of a surviving spouse (whether married or common-law), parents, grandparents, children, or siblings whom the deceased was legally obliged to support.

Dependants may claim against property not normally falling into the estate, such as deathbed gifts, insurance and retirement plans payable to a named beneficiary, and jointly held property.

If there are no children, a widow or widower takes the whole estate.

Where no close family members survive, more remote next-of-kin are entitled to share the estate.

Only where there is no next-of-kin does the province acquire the assets.

What are some of the perils in relying on the default will?

The taxman delights in succession other than by will – capital gains are maximized, undesignated retirement savings plans become taxable, and credits for charitable gifts are unobtainable.

Strangers may administer the estate. 

Investment opportunities are limited. 

Children's shares are paid into court until they are eighteen years of age, an age at which not all beneficiaries have the experience to make proper monetary decisions.  Estate assets, including the home the children live in, may have to be sold so that funds can be paid into court.  Accessing trust funds for earlier needs is problematic.

Special needs children may lose benefits. 

Heirlooms and collectibles may be sold and the proceeds divided.

Survivorship plans for jointly held property and named beneficiaries of insurance and registered retirement plans may not succeed where the intended beneficiary does not survive the deceased.

Shares in the estate may be inequitably divided between families or among family members.  An example of the former is the death of a surviving spouse just days after the death of his or her partner and children wherein all assets of both husband and wife would devolve only upon the family of the spouse who is last to die.

Spouses of inheritors can claim an interest in the growth of inheritances. Descendants may include a wider definition of children than would a deceased have intended.

Administration of the estate is delayed pending court order. Bonding of administrators is more likely to be required. Court fees are maximized and costs of administration escalate.

Estate planning merits careful review of alternatives.

Estate planning cannot be delegated. Even a power of attorney does not confer a right to make or change a will.

Except in the most unusual circumstances, the statutory scheme can be improved upon. As much as death is a certainty, administration without a will can be fraught with uncertainty.