Life insurance in Saint-Eustache

CWCC works with families, business owners and retirees in Saint-Eustache and the Basses-Laurentides on life insurance, living benefits, succession planning and capital strategy: entirely online. The firm is registered with the Autorité des marchés financiers under number 602293, where Jose Salloum practises as a Financial Security Advisor.

What makes Saint-Eustache different

Saint-Eustache sits in a particular position: close enough to Laval and Montreal that many people work there, established enough that others never left.

A population ageing in place. Families settled since the nineteen-seventies or eighties, whose adult children sometimes live a few streets away.

A manufacturing and commercial fabric. Mid-sized businesses, often family-held, with shareholders the same age as the company.

Working farmland still in operation. On the outskirts, with the succession questions that come with it.

A great many commuters. Two-income households whose financial organisation rests entirely on one person.

If the policy owner becomes incapable

This is the central question here, and it concerns a period ordinary estate planning ignores completely: the one where the person is still alive but no longer able to manage their affairs.

What actually causes a policy to be lost

The cause is almost never legal. A policy is lost because the premium stops being paid, and the premium stops being paid because nobody around the person knows the contract exists.

The contract then runs its normal course: a missed payment, a grace period, then lapse. The insurer has no way of knowing why the payments stopped, and it is not required to guess.

Pre-authorised payment is, in this context, a real and often underestimated protection: it keeps working without human intervention. The account does have to stay funded, which assumes somebody is minding the rest.

The protection mandate, and the delay nobody anticipates

In Quebec, the protection mandate is the document by which you designate in advance who will look after you and your property should you become incapable.

It has one decisive feature: it does not take effect on signing. It first has to be homologated, following an assessment of incapacity, and that process takes time.

The result is an interval few families see coming: between the moment the person can no longer manage their affairs and the moment the mandatary obtains authority to act, nobody has the power to do anything, and the ordinary payments keep falling due.

What a mandatary can do about a policy

Once the mandate is homologated, the mandatary’s powers depend on what the mandate grants, and certain decisions touching an insurance policy are treated differently from ordinary acts of administration.

We will not settle that question here, because it belongs to law rather than to insurance. What we can say is this: if you want your mandatary to be able to take particular steps regarding your contracts, the time to raise it with your notary is when the mandate is being drafted, not afterwards.

The four things to do while everything is fine

• Have a protection mandate. Without one, the family has to go through opening a protective supervision regime, which is longer and heavier.
• Pay by pre-authorised debit. It is the mechanism that carries through the interval without intervention.
• Make sure at least one person knows the policies exist, with the insurer’s name and the contract number.
• Check your disability and critical illness coverage. Incapacity sometimes arrives long before death, and it is that period that costs a family the most.

A note for family businesses

Where a company holds a policy on a shareholder’s life, that shareholder’s incapacity raises a further question: who exercises their votes in the meantime, and whether the business can keep making decisions.

That is provided for in the shareholders’ agreement, alongside the death clauses. An agreement that deals with death but is silent on incapacity is incomplete, and it is your lawyer who should be told so.

The Quebec framework

The points that govern any planning here bear repeating. A common-law partner does not inherit without a will, however long the relationship has lasted. Designating a married or civil-union spouse is in principle irrevocable unless stated otherwise. The liquidator replaces the executor.

A notarial will does not have to be probated, unlike a holograph will or one made before witnesses. The same practical advantage applies to a notarial protection mandate.

What we do for families here

We ask whether a protection mandate exists, and if so, whether anybody knows where it is. It is an insurance question to the extent that the absence of a mandate puts your contracts at risk, and that is all we will say about it.

We put premiums on pre-authorised debit where possible, and we encourage you to write down what you hold.

We send you to your notary for the mandate itself and the powers to provide for in it, and to your lawyer for the shareholders’ agreement.

The first meeting

Half an hour, by video, at no cost and with nothing to sign. An adult child can attend if you wish: it is often the most useful conversation a family can have before it needs to. At the end you will know whether this belongs in your situation, and if the answer is no, you will hear it during the meeting.

Frequently asked questions