A legal, but not ethical, right to parents’ money

In your Jan. 2 column, “Brother threatens to sue for share of parents’ wealth,” you gave advice regarding a joint account between deceased parents and a surviving child.

Unfortunately, you waded into a legal matter. In Ontario, there is a legal presumption that funds in a joint bank account between a parent and adult child form part of the estate, and do not go to the surviving account holder.

It is a rebuttable presumption, but the onus rests with the surviving offspring to provide evidence that the intent was for the money to go to him, not the estate. Your advice should have been for the writer to seek legal counsel. So my question: Did you have too many rum-and-eggnogs prior to writing that column?

Rum? On Jan. 2? Psshaww. Sober as a judge, legally speaking.

But your letter provides occasion to restate principles I’ve outlined before.

First, this is a 500-word column. Most questions I receive are much longer; the email summarized above was originally 519 words, before I interjected my pearls of wisdom. So the questions readers see are usually edited, sometimes drastically. I try, really hard, to rephrase issues in a way that, while concise, is faithful to the intent of the correspondent. But many details are left out, sometimes leaving you, while plumbing the wonders of my response, to query, “where did that comment come from?” That’s a problem for which I’ve never found a perfect solution.

Second, this is an ethics column — not a legal aid forum. And what’s right in the world of ethics is not identical to what’s accepted in law. A trivial example: back in 2014, the city of Mississauga passed a bylaw restricting the use of clotheslines. One line per household, and (seriously), it had better be straight. This in a world worried about climate change! So, in such a realm of juris non-prudence, is it right to hang out your clothes or better to use a dryer? Ethically, the clothesline wins hands-down. Legally, heat up the dryer and get that meter spinning, so your neighbour doesn’t have to gawk at your undies.

Which brings us to a third point. In the column in question, I emphasized that my response was from “an ethical point of view” while sorting out legalities is “what courts are for.” Ethically, the notion that an adult child, 30 years into his career and living on the other side of the world, should have a “right” to inherit his parents’ money is absurd.

Parents of independent, grown-up kids should be free to do whatever they like with their resources, both before and after death. If they choose to leave money to one or all of their kids, great. That’s a kindness, but ethically, it’s neither a right nor an obligation. The kids are all grown up; the parents have done their job.

Legally, however, when people are negligent, failing to make their intentions clear in a will, courts sometimes have to intervene. Situations like the one briefly summarized in that column are complicated legally; that, as perhaps I mentioned, “is what courts are for.” But ethically, a son who lives “away” for 30 years and leaves the care of aging parents to his sibs, has no right to expect an inheritance. Send your questions to star.ethics@yahoo.ca.