The Canada Will Registry is a web platform for registering and searching for estate planning documents.
Here's how it works:
- Law firms register their wills on the Canada Will Registry.
- Someone searching for a will fills out a form on our website, and our system automatically matches that search against the database of registered wills. (Note: The person searching the Canada Will Registry does not see the direct results of the search.)
- If a matching will is found, we alert the law firm who registered it, and they'll have 30 days to contact the searcher, provided the searcher is someone they can share this information with.
- We issue a Search Certificate to the searcher, detailing exactly what they searched for and how many wills this was checked against. This serves as proof that the searcher took effective action to check for missing wills.