LEGAL REPORT/WILLS, TRUSTS, AND ESTATES
Moving away from the judicious-parent test
Recent rulings signal an increased reluctance to vary a will when a parent gives a legitimate explanation for deciding to disinherit a child. BY SHANNON KARI
To her son, she leſt one cent. It was a decision with a detailed explanation. In the will, draſted in British Columbia three years before her death in 2000, she referred to another document in which she outlined a long list of complaints about the behaviour of her only son, dating back to when he was a teenager more than three decades earlier.
T
he fiſth and final will prepared by Patricia Luz Holvenstot divided near- ly all of her assets among her three adult daughters.
Bruce Holvenstot rarely read books or cleaned his room, to planting marijua- na on family property, resulting in his mother being placed on probation for a year. The complaints, outlined in a six- page hand-written letter dated October 1993, also referenced ongoing proceed- ings in New Jersey, involving her son and one of her daughters and whether he had improperly tried to obtain her property. "The final straw was he tried to have me declared incompetent," wrote Patricia Holvenstot, who moved from
The allegations ranged from claims 46 OCTO BER 2012 www.CANADIAN Lawyermag.com
New Jersey to Courtenay B.C. in 1996 to live with one of her daughters. Almost two decades aſter she listed
the grievances, her desire to disinherit her son was upheld this summer by B.C. Su- preme Court Justice Douglas Halfyard. In Holvenstot v. Holvenstot, he found the ap- proximately $320,000 in the estate should be divided among the daughters and dis- missed a claim to vary the will (a statement of claim was filed in 2001 by the son, but the case did not go to trial until aſter a cer- tificate of pending litigation was cancelled by a B.C. court in 2011).
Peter mitchell
