When a will stops being up to date

You separate from a partner you were not married to. You move on. Your will carries on saying exactly what it said: that this person inherits.

Nothing in the law revokes a legacy because a couple has broken up. No delay, no automatic effect, no «it lapses by itself». The document stays valid as it is, and that is the one that will be opened.

It is the most common way a will becomes untrue, and the easiest to fix: you make a new one.

A divorce or the dissolution of a civil union in principle revokes the legacy made to the former spouse, unless the will provided otherwise. The law assumes that was no longer your intention.

That settles only part of the question, though: the rest of the will continues to apply exactly as written. If your former spouse was also named liquidator, or tutor to your children, or if the legacy that was theirs was then to be divided, those are questions the document did not anticipate.

Separation from bed and board, de facto separation, proceedings under way: none of these is a divorce. Until judgment is rendered, nothing is revoked.

A will appoints people: one or more heirs, a liquidator, sometimes a tutor for minor children. Those people age, move away, fall ill or die before you.

A liquidator who now lives abroad, a tutor you are no longer in touch with, an heir who died without the will providing for what happens to their share: each of these takes two minutes to settle when thought of in advance, and costs months when it was not.

Naming a replacement liquidator is the simplest precaution, and the least often taken.

It is not the amount that matters, it is the nature. Buying a property, especially with someone, starting a business, receiving an inheritance or acquiring an asset abroad: each of these creates questions a will written earlier could not settle.

A child being born, too. And a child reaching adulthood, because the tutorship you had provided for no longer has an object.

If you have come from another province or another country, your will may well remain valid here, but it was written under another system of law and with other reflexes. That is the moment to have it read by someone who knows Québec’s.

Do not correct a will by hand. Crossing out a name, adding a line in the margin or attaching a signed note does not amend a notarial will, and it turns a holograph will into a document the heirs will have to ask a court to interpret.

The right way is the simplest: a new will revokes the previous one. There is no limit to how often, and the last one is the one that counts: which is precisely why a will search is run on death.

The rest is set out on the will page, with the three forms recognised in Québec and the probate each one does or does not entail.