Why fair and equal aren’t always the same thing
The lawyer’s office was quiet the way that rooms get quiet when something important is about to happen.
Two siblings sat across from each other at a long table, which was appropriate, because that is exactly where they had been for the last six months. Their parents had been gone long enough now that the grief had softened into something more manageable, but not long enough that any of this felt normal yet.
The will was read. Everything had been divided equally, just as their parents had always promised it would be. The cottage in the Laurentians went to the older sister, who had spent every summer there since childhood and loved it more than anywhere on earth. Her brother received a cash equivalent, a fair and reasonable valuation, prepared by a professional, signed and certified.
He looked at the number on the page.
She looked at him.
Neither of them said anything for a long time.
The cottage had been in the family for thirty years. He had watched his parents build it. He had learned to swim in that lake. He had proposed to his wife on that dock. No number on a page was going to feel like an equal trade for that, and they both knew it. His sister felt it too, which somehow made it worse.
Their parents had tried to be equal. They had succeeded, technically. But in that lawyer’s office, in that moment, equal felt like the loneliest word in the world.
The relationship that survived everything, distance, disagreement, decades, did not survive the estate.
The Myth of Equal
We grow up believing that equal is the same thing as fair. It makes sense. As children, we counted the candies in each pile. We measured the inches of birthday cake. We watched our parents carefully, looking for any sign that a sibling was loved a little more, treated a little better, valued a little higher.
So it is no surprise that when Canadian parents sit down to write their wills, the instinct is almost always the same. Split it equally. Give each child the same share. Let the math be the proof of the love.
It is a beautiful instinct. It is also, in many families, exactly the wrong approach.
The problem is that estates are not made of equal things. They are made of cottages and farms and family businesses and RRSPs and life insurance policies and personal belongings that carry forty years of memory inside them. These assets do not behave the same way. They do not feel the same way. They cannot simply be divided by the number of children and called fair.
A cottage worth $400,000 on an appraisal may be worth $4,000,000 in memories to one child and nothing but a maintenance headache to another. A family farm that one sibling has worked for twenty years carries a completely different meaning than the cash equivalent sitting in an investment account. An RRSP triggers tax on death. A life insurance policy does not. Equal portions of an unequal mix of assets will almost never produce an equal outcome.
Fair and equal are not synonyms. They never really were. And the families who understand that distinction before they need to are the ones who tend to come through the estate process with their relationships intact.
The Tremblays
Michel and Suzanne Tremblay built their cottage on a quiet lake in the Laurentians the summer their oldest daughter Isabelle turned six. It was a modest place by any measure, two bedrooms, a screened porch that faced the water, and a dock that Michel rebuilt by hand every spring without complaint for thirty years. They paid $40,000 for the land and spent another $30,000 putting the cottage up with the help of friends and family over two long summers.
Isabelle grew up on that lake. She learned to swim there, spent every July there, and when she had children of her own, she brought them there too. Her younger brother Philippe loved the cottage as a child but had moved to Vancouver in his twenties, built a life there, and the cottage had quietly become less central to his world. He still came back when he could, and he loved it when he did, but it was Isabelle’s place in a way that everyone in the family understood without ever saying out loud.
When Michel and Suzanne were gone, the cottage was appraised at $380,000. They had left it to Isabelle, which felt right to everyone, including Philippe, at least at first. To equalize the estate, Philippe received a cash equivalent drawn from their parents’ investment accounts.
What nobody had accounted for was that the Laurentians had changed. Cottage prices had climbed steadily for a decade, and by the time the estate was settled, comparable properties on the same lake were selling for closer to $600,000. Philippe’s cash equivalent, calculated on the earlier appraisal, suddenly felt significantly less equal than it had on paper.
He didn’t raise it directly with Isabelle. She sensed it anyway. The calls that used to come every couple of weeks became monthly, then occasional. Nobody fought. Nobody said anything unkind. The distance was quieter and more permanent than a fight would have been, because there was nothing to resolve. The will had been executed exactly as written. Everything was legal, proper and final.
Michel and Suzanne had done everything right, by every conventional measure. They had written a will. They had tried to be equal. They had thought about their children and what each of them would want.
What they hadn’t done was plan for the gap between the value of an asset on paper and the value of an asset in a family.
The Martins
Robert and Carol Martin farmed the same 200 acres of southwestern Ontario land that Robert’s father had broken before him. It was a grain operation, modest by modern standards but productive, and it had supported the family through four decades of good years and bad ones without ever quite letting them down.
Their son David had never really left. He had gone away for two years of agricultural college, come back at twenty, and quietly absorbed the farm into his identity the way that farmers do. He was up before sunrise most mornings. He knew every corner of every field. He had put his own money back into the operation over the years, upgrading equipment, improving drainage, making the kind of long-term investments that only someone planning to stay forever would make.
Their daughter Karen had grown up on the farm, loved it as a child, and chosen a different life with equal conviction. She was a teacher in Guelph, happy in her work, rooted in her community, and completely uninterested in farming. She did not want the farm. She wanted to know that her parents were proud of her path, and they were.
Robert and Carol spent years quietly wrestling with the question of how to be fair to both of their children. They loved David and Karen with exactly equal ferocity. They wanted neither child to feel like an afterthought.
In the end they did what many farm families do. They left the farm to both children equally, fifty percent each, because it felt like the only way to say with legal certainty that they had loved them the same.
David found out on the same day Karen did, sitting in the same lawyer’s office, reading the same document.
He had given twenty years to that land. He had declined other opportunities, other paths, other versions of his life, because the farm was going to be his. That had never been written down anywhere, but it had been understood, or so he had believed.
Karen did not want to be difficult. She genuinely did not. But she had a family of her own, a mortgage of her own, and a fifty percent share of a working farm was a significant asset that her family could use. Her husband, who had not grown up with David and did not carry the same history, saw it more simply still. It was an asset. Assets have value. Value can be converted.
The conversations that followed were the hardest the Martin family had ever had. David eventually bought Karen out, but the process took three years, required financing that put real pressure on the farm’s operation, and left a residue of tension between the siblings that neither of them had wanted and both of them felt.
Robert and Carol had loved their children equally. Nobody who knew them would have doubted it for a moment.
But equal, again, was not the same as fair. And the plan they had chosen, with the best intentions in the world, had made a hard situation harder than it needed to be.
Why Parents Go Quiet
If you have read this far and recognised your own family in either of those stories, you are not alone. And if you are a parent who has been quietly avoiding this conversation, you are not alone in that either.
In twenty five years of working with Canadian families on estate and legacy planning, I have never once met a parent who avoided this conversation because they didn’t care. Every single one of them cared deeply. The avoidance almost always comes from exactly the same place that the equal split comes from. Love.
Parents don’t want any child to feel less loved. They don’t want to have a conversation that might make one child feel like a burden, or another feel like a favourite. They don’t want to introduce tension into relationships that are otherwise warm. They don’t want to think about their own mortality any more than they have to, and sitting down to divide your estate in specific and deliberate detail requires you to think about very little else.
So the conversation gets deferred. This year becomes next year. Next year becomes when we update the will. Updating the will becomes something we really should get around to. And then one day the conversation is no longer available, and the children are sitting in a lawyer’s office trying to interpret decisions that were made without them, for reasons they can only guess at, with no parent left in the room to explain what was meant or how much they were loved.
The silence that parents choose to protect their children almost always produces exactly the conflict they were trying to prevent. Not because the parents failed, but because good intentions without a good plan leave too much to chance and too much to interpretation.
The families who come through estate transitions with their relationships intact almost always share one thing in common. Somebody started the conversation while there was still time to have it properly.
The Tools That Make Fair Possible
The good news is that the problems the Tremblays and the Martins faced are not new ones, and they are not unsolvable ones. There are real tools available to Canadian families that can make fair possible, even when equal is not.
Life Insurance as the Great Equalizer
Of all the tools available to families navigating an unequal estate, life insurance is the one I return to most often, because it solves the core problem more cleanly than anything else.
The Tremblay cottage and the Martin farm are illiquid assets. You cannot split a cottage or a farm down the middle without destroying the very thing that makes it valuable, to the family and to the market. Asking one sibling to buy the other out creates exactly the kind of financial pressure and resentment that David Martin experienced. Forcing a sale satisfies nobody and honours nothing.
And then there is the tax reality that too many Canadian families discover only after the fact.
A cottage is not a principal residence. When a parent passes away, Canada Revenue Agency treats it as a deemed disposition at fair market value. On a property purchased for $70,000 that is now worth $600,000, that is a significant capital gain and a significant tax bill, arriving at exactly the moment the family is least prepared to absorb it. The child who inherits the cottage is not just receiving a gift. In many cases they are also inheriting a liability.
Farm property carries its own complexity. There is a lifetime capital gains exemption available on qualified farm property in Canada that can shelter a meaningful amount of the gain, but it has conditions and planning requirements that need to be addressed well in advance to be used effectively.
This article is not your estate plan. But these are real considerations that belong in any honest conversation about what equal and fair actually mean when it comes time to divide what you have built.
A parent can leave the cottage to the child who loves it, leave the farm to the child who has built their life around it, and fund a life insurance policy that delivers a tax free lump sum to the other children at the time of death. The child who receives the illiquid asset keeps it intact. The child who receives the insurance proceeds gets a meaningful, immediate and tax free inheritance that does not require anyone to sell anything, borrow anything, or sit across a lawyer’s table feeling like they received the consolation prize.
For the Tremblays, a joint last to die policy structured to account for both the value gap and the embedded tax liability on the cottage would have meant Philippe received something that felt genuinely equal rather than technically equal. Isabelle would have kept the cottage she loved. The calls would still be coming every two weeks.
For the Martins, a policy structured to give Karen a tax free payment equivalent to the fair market value of her share would have meant David never needed to finance a buyout under pressure. The farm would have stayed a farm. The three years of difficult conversations might have been one afternoon.
Documenting Gifts and Support Given During Life
Many Canadian parents quietly support their children financially during their lifetime and never account for that support in their estate plan. A down payment contributed to one child’s first home. Years of subsidised childcare. A loan that was quietly forgiven. These are real transfers of wealth, and when they are not documented and factored into the estate, they become invisible fault lines that surface at exactly the wrong moment. A thoughtful estate plan accounts for what has already been given, not just what remains to be distributed.
A Buy Sell Agreement for the Family Business
For farm and business families, a properly structured buy sell agreement gives the working child a clear and affordable path to full ownership while protecting the non-working child’s financial interest. It establishes a price, a timeline and a financing structure in advance, when everyone is still on good terms and thinking clearly, rather than in the aftermath of a death when emotions are raw and every conversation carries extra weight.
A Letter of Wishes
A letter of wishes may be the most underused and most powerful tool on this list. It is not a legal document and it does not override the will. But it does something no legal document can do. It explains, in a parent’s own words, why the decisions were made, what was considered, and how much each child was loved.
The question children almost always carry out of a lawyer’s office is not really about money. It is the same question they have been asking since childhood, expressed in a new and painful context. Did they love us equally?
A letter of wishes answers that question directly, in the parent’s own voice, at the moment it is most needed. The Tremblays and the Martins did not lack for love. They lacked for explanation. A letter of wishes is the explanation.
The Conversation Worth Having
There is a moment in almost every family where the estate conversation becomes possible. It is not always comfortable. It is not always initiated gracefully. But it happens, and when it does, it tends to go better than anyone expected.
The families who navigate estate transitions well are not the ones who had the simplest assets or the most straightforward circumstances. They are almost always the ones where a parent sat down with their children, while there was still time, and said something honest. Not to divide things up in a meeting. Not to get permission or avoid conflict entirely. But to share their intentions and their love in the same breath, so that neither was ever in doubt when the time came.
That conversation does not need to be a formal event. It does not need lawyers present or a prepared agenda. It can happen at the cottage on a Sunday morning, or around the kitchen table, or on a quiet drive. What matters is that it happens. That the children hear, in their parent’s own words, what was considered and why, and that they leave that conversation feeling seen rather than surprised.
The Tremblays and the Martins were not careless people. They were loving people who ran out of time to say out loud what they had always meant to say. That is not a character flaw. It is a very human thing. But it is also a preventable one.
Equal is a number. Fair is a feeling. The families who get this right are the ones who understand that both matter, and who take the time to build a plan that honours both, while they still can.
A Note from KB
I have sat across from enough Canadian families in the aftermath of an estate to know that the conflict almost never starts with greed. It starts with hurt. With the feeling that something important was not seen, or not valued, or not explained. Most of the time, a little planning and an honest conversation would have changed everything.
If this article made you think about your own family, I would gently suggest that the thought is worth following. Not because the conversation will be easy, but because the alternative, leaving it to a lawyer’s office and a document that cannot speak for itself, is so much harder.
If you would like to talk through what fair looks like for your family, I am easy to reach. There is no obligation and no agenda. Just a conversation, which is exactly where all of this should start.
You can reach me at: Book a Call with KB
And if this article resonated with you, I would be grateful if you passed it along to someone who might need to read it. A sibling. A spouse. A friend who has been quietly avoiding the same conversation. Sometimes the most useful thing we can do for the people we love is hand them something that says what we have not quite found the words to say ourselves.
As always, I wish you health and hapiness.
With gratitude,
KB Henry
This article is provided as a general source of information only and should not be considered personal financial, tax or legal advice. Individual circumstances vary. Please consult with a qualified financial advisor to determine whether any strategy discussed is appropriate for your specific situation.