Thorough estate planning ‘one of the most loving things': financial planner
What does it matter if I'm going to be dead anyway?
It's a comment sometimes heard by Julia Chung, an advice-only financial planner at Spring Planning in Vancouver.
Her retort: 'It isn't about you. It's about the people that you leave behind.'
Having a well-thought-out estate plan is 'one of the most loving things you can do for your friends and family,' Chung says.
And it goes far beyond drawing up a will laying out who gets what when you're six feet under.
Indeed, Chung says there's planning that must be done for when you're still among the living, but may have lost the ability to make your own decisions due to dementia or other conditions.
People are living longer thanks to advances in science, 'but not all of us are going to live really well,' Chung says.
A power of attorney is set out in a document entirely separate from a will, and doesn't automatically default to a spouse or adult child.
There are also financial assets that fall outside of a person's will that need to be sorted out, like beneficiary designations for life insurance, RRSPs and TFSAs.
The last thing a bereaved loved one wants to do is go on a wild-goose chase for the information they need to tie up financial loose ends, so some of Chung's clients have a binder put together with key information.
'What information do they need? Just having a will isn't going to tell them where you bank or how to access your mail or who your investment adviser is,' says Chung.
'So how do we get that information to them?'
Another aspect to think through is how and when any minor children left behind can access their inheritance.
Chung recommends structuring a trust so a young person gets the funds in staggered amounts, not in one big lump sum.
'As I always say to my clients when I see this, 'Think back to when you were 18 or 19. Were you making really smart financial decisions? Because I wasn't,'' she says.
Last month, IG Wealth Management released its annual estate planning study, which suggested 54 per cent of Canadians lack a plan.
Twenty-nine per cent of respondents said their reason for not having an estate plan was their perceived lack of wealth.
'Ironically, I think that in many cases, it's the people who don't have sufficient wealth yet that need to think about estate planning the most, especially if they have dependents,' said Christine Van Cauwenberghe, IG's head of financial planning in Winnipeg.
Forty per cent of respondents reported having legal documents in place to safeguard their finances should they be diagnosed with cognitive decline.
The survey was conducted online by Pollara Strategic Insights, and polled 1,017 adult Canadians between April 10 and 21. The polling industry's professional body, the Canadian Research Insights Council, says online surveys cannot be assigned a margin of error because they do not randomly sample the population.
Van Cauwenberghe says estate planning can be made more complicated in blended families. For instance, it could be all well and good for someone to designate a partner a direct beneficiary for a life insurance policy.
But if that partner passes away, children from a previous relationship may be 'completely disinherited,' she says.
'It's usually inadvertent, but it's just due to a lack of planning.'
Another item to check off the to-do list is to choose who can serve as executor of your estate, power of attorney and guardian to minor children.
It's not necessarily best to have the same person do each job, and it may not make sense to tab someone close to you.
'I think sometimes people choose their executor because they think that person will be offended if you don't choose them. That person would probably be relieved not to be chosen,' says Van Cauwenberghe, adding corporate trustees are an option when there's no one willing or able to take on the tasks.
'It's a big job and understand that most people don't have any experience in it. They don't know what to do, they delay, they make mistakes, they don't reach out to the right experts and it can be very stressful.'
Van Cauwenberghe says it can be tough to put these difficult decisions at the top of the priority list.
'If you never set aside the time, it's never gonna happen,' she says.
'But you're not going to be the one to pay the price. It will be your loved ones who will pay the price for your lack of planning.'
This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 19, 2025.
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Combined, Hasenfratz said that means far too many well-educated Canadians are working in areas that do not make a dime. 'We need to get more people into revenue-generating businesses and that would have an enormous positive impact on productivity,' she said. Hasenfratz also pointed out that the stories we choose to tell about ourselves matter. 'When you hear things like Canada is not productive, that is not very inspiring, and it doesn't make you think, 'Damn, I'm going to get in there and be more productive tomorrow,'' she said. 'But if you see an example of a company that has doubled its productivity over the past 15 years and in doing so has gained business, grown profit and realized a great return on investment, then you'll be like, 'I want to do that,' because that is inspiring.' Trevor Tombe, a University of Calgary economics professor, recognizes Canada is awash with unrealized potential, but said there are issues in trying to realize those gains. Let's imagine Hasenfratz and her manufacturing sector pals, oil producers and agriculturists are all able to generate more of what the world wants for export — especially to destinations other than the U.S. All that stuff would need to get loaded into massive container ships at the ports of Vancouver, Montreal and Halifax. But the Port of Vancouver is already the largest on the North American West Coast and is handling record levels of cargo. An expansion that has been in the works since 2013 will not be completed until sometime in the 2030s. Montreal got the ball rolling on its port expansion in 2018, but it's still in progress and a long ways away. 'If you want to sell a good to another country beyond the United States, you are not doing it by truck or rail; you're doing it by port because there's an ocean in the way,' Tombe said. 'Right now, we don't have any excess port capacity that would allow us to trade much more with other countries, and in terms of a construction timeline in Vancouver, it is plausibly 20 years from start to finish.' If Canada is unable to get its goods moving, diversify its trade partners, grow exports to China, Japan, South Korea, India and so on, the U.S. is left as the only option. That is not a great position to be in when negotiating a new trade deal with Donald Trump. One option is to build ports elsewhere, such as the Arctic. There currently isn't a deepwater port to speak of there, but there's been plenty of talk of building one — some day. 'There is not just economic and productivity implications of bad federal policy around infrastructure, but national security implications,' Tombe said. Another area in need of a makeover that does not require anything more complicated and time-consuming than playing around with some accounting software datasets is tax policy. Small businesses, defined as companies with less than 500 employees, employ almost 50 per cent of the labour force. But they don't make capital investments in machinery and equipment at the same levels as Canada's G7 peers, apart from the Italians, who invest even less. A worker who lacks the latest tools is not as productive as the worker who does. Companies that retool an assembly line, upgrade laptops and arm staff with best-in-class gadgets are able to write off the expenditures over a number of years, but that 'delays the value' of the tax deductions, Tombe said. Were a company able to write off the new laptops in one fell swoop at the time of purchase, well, now we would be talking, he said, and the conversation would lead to an environment where companies are encouraged to reinvest today. 'It is a way to cut corporate taxes on new investment while maintaining corporate taxes on companies as a whole, so it's less costly than just dropping the corporate tax rate itself,' he said. That may seem an easy thing to do, and the same goes for another productivity fix that relates to Canada's secret weapon: immigrants. Walid Hejazi, an economics professor at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management, meets a lot of them, and he said the old joke about the backseat of a taxi being the safest place to have a heart attack still holds up, though the taxi-driving doctor from abroad today is probably behind the wheel of an Uber. Hejazi, through the university, works with a group of immigrant women who all have university degrees from another country. They are smart, savvy and eager to become productive new Canadians. 'Do you know what the No. 1 job these women get offered is?' he said. 'Serving coffee at Tim Hortons.' Rotman puts the newcomers through a crash micro-business course. If successfully completed, that earns them a micro-credential from the school, which hopefully catches the eye of an artificial intelligence employment screener and gets them a face-to-face interview with another human. 'The goal here is to match the women with jobs that are more commensurate with their skills,' he said. As for being compared to the U.S., he said being neighbours has been a gift. We share the same language and customs, generally get along and find it easy to do business with one another to the extent that Canada's ho-hum productivity level has not been a handicap. But where it starts to be a big problem is when the U.S. closes for business and Canadian companies are forced to win market share abroad. 'It is relatively easy for a Canadian company to do business in the U.S., and it requires productivity at a given level,' he said. 'But to go to Europe and Asia and compete requires a much higher productivity level.' Canada may be having a productivity 'emergency,' but its productivity is improving, just at a slower rate than other countries with similar attributes. That is partly why Frances Donald gets the urge to 'vent' when she speaks about productivity, since obsessing over the numbers can obscure a more fundamental question: What kind of Canada do Canadians aspire to? 'You could conceive a plan that would mechanically boost our productivity number,' she said. 'But it wouldn't actually make the Canadian economy better for most Canadians.' For example, not all those productivity-sapping public-sector employees are administrators pushing paper around. They are also teachers, cops, wildfire fighters and doctors. Close to 20 per cent of Canadians have already ticked past age 65, and odds are that a care facility is in their future at some point. 'If I told you that we could quadruple the number of high-productivity engineers, but we dramatically reduce the number of doctors and that would result in higher productivity statistics, then you might hear Canadians say, 'Could I please pick the health-care workers over the high-productivity engineer?'' Donald said. Economists have spent a decade highlighting Canada's productivity ills, from internal trade barriers to reduced investment in the natural resource sector to an affordable housing crisis that only gets worse by the year. It is a drumbeat of doom that can overshadow what Canada has, chiefly, a highly educated population, a massive breadbasket of agricultural goods, oil and gas and critical minerals galore and plenty of room for the world's best and brightest who may be keen to sign on. 'In Canada, we don't have to ask what we are going to bake out of nothing because we already have a long list of something,' Donald said. 'Our project is to have a collective understanding of what this country has been blessed in, from things in the ground to our incredibly high level of education — spanning from goods to a blossoming services sector. Canada is not short on the ingredients to build a powerful economy; where we have fallen short is on the execution.' • Email: joconnor@
