When to make a protection mandate

A father telling the same story twice in one evening. A mother who has paid the electricity bill three times. A fall, a hospital stay, a sentence from the doctor nobody saw coming. That is when the family asks what needs doing, and that is when they find out there was something to do beforehand.

A protection mandate appoints who will look after you and your property should you become incapable. To sign it, you have to understand what you are signing. The Gouvernement du Québec puts it plainly for a mandate made before witnesses: they must be able to attest in writing that the person has full intellectual capacity to make it.

So there is no catching up. The document meant for incapacity is precisely the one that can no longer be made once incapacity is there. It is the only piece of the planning that has a deadline, and nobody knows their own.

That is also why the question is rarely asked at the right time: while everything is fine, nothing prompts it.

Many families stop at the diagnosis. They have been told Alzheimer’s, so they assume it is over, and they do not even ask. That is not how the question works.

What counts is understanding at the moment of signing, and for that act specifically. Someone who has lived with a degenerative illness for two years may well understand that they are appointing their son to look after their affairs, and what that entails. Someone else, after a stroke, may stop understanding it overnight.

It is in fact what a notary checks before drafting: that you understand what you are signing, and that nobody has had you sign it. If there is any doubt, the notary does not draft: a mandate signed by someone who no longer understood is exactly what will be challenged, years later, by whoever has an interest in challenging it.

The practical conclusion runs both ways. A diagnosis does not mean it is too late: ask. And good health does not mean there is time: waiting is a bet on a date nobody knows.

Since 2022 there has been something between «everything is fine» and «it is too late», and it is often the answer to the very situation worrying the family.

The assistance measure lets an adult be assisted by one or two trusted people in making decisions, exercising their rights and managing their property. The Curateur public recognises them officially and enters them in a public register that banks, businesses and government departments can consult: the assistant no longer has to explain who they are on every call.

What an assistant does not do matters just as much: they do not decide for you and do not sign for you. They come with you, they obtain information, they help you get things done. You remain the person who decides, and that is the whole point of the measure.

So it does not replace a protection mandate, and it would be dangerous to treat it as one: it serves while you are still able to decide, and it stops where the mandate begins. What it can do is buy you the room to make the mandate properly, rather than signing it in a hospital corridor.

Where incapacity has arrived and there is no mandate, the family applies to the court and a tutorship may be opened.

It is then, according to the Gouvernement du Québec, health and social services professionals, family members, friends and those close to the person who propose to the court who should be charged with their protection and the management of their property. The court decides.

None of that is a disaster: tutorship is real protection, supervised and reviewed. But it is protection decided by other people, and the person’s own wishes become harder to establish, especially once they can no longer express them. The full procedure is set out on the protection mandate page.

That is the paradox of this document: it is made well when it is not on anyone’s mind. At that point there is time to choose your mandatary, to tell them beforehand rather than afterwards, to write down where you want to live and what you refuse.

And signing costs nothing in independence: while you are capable, the mandate sleeps. You run your affairs exactly as before, and you can redo it whenever you like: after a separation, a move, a mandatary leaving the country.

The useful habit is to make it at the same time as the power of attorney, because the two answer each other: a power of attorney serves while you are capable and stops the day you are not, and that is exactly the day the mandate takes over. One without the other leaves a gap, and that gap lasts months.

There is no age for making a protection mandate. There is only a moment after which you no longer can.