What happens to your online accounts when you die in Canada

When David's father passed away in Halifax, the funeral was the easy part. The hard part came three weeks later, at the kitchen table, with a laptop open and nobody able to log in. The bank accounts were online only. The life insurance policy lived in an inbox David could not reach. The family photos from forty years sat behind an Apple password that died with his dad.

David is not careless, and his father was not disorganized. They ran into the thing almost every Canadian family runs into. When someone dies, their paperwork has a clear path through the courts. Their digital life usually does not.

Here is exactly where the law stands in Canada, what each big platform actually lets your family do, and how to set things up now so your own family never has the kitchen-table moment.

Your executor's rights depend entirely on where you live

Estate law is provincial in Canada, so the rules for digital assets are a patchwork. Four jurisdictions have enacted a version of the Uniform Law Conference of Canada's model law (the Uniform Access to Digital Assets by Fiduciaries Act), which gives your executor the same right to your digital accounts that you have while you are alive.

The courts are starting to side with families

In April 2026, an Alberta judge drew a line. In a case called Wada Estate (Re), the administrators of an estate had a valid Grant of Administration, but Apple refused to give them access without a second, Apple-specific court order on top of it. Justice Colin Feasby refused to make them get one, writing that the court "is not in the business of issuing duplicative orders to assuage risk averse technology companies," and warned that companies who keep demanding redundant orders could be made to pay the family's legal costs (Canadian Lawyer).

It is one decision in one province. It is also the clearest signal yet that a valid Canadian grant should be enough, and that the era of tech companies stonewalling grieving families has a shelf life.

What each platform actually lets your family do

You do not have to wait for the law to catch up. Most major platforms already have a feature that hands the right person access when you are gone, but almost nobody turns it on. Five minutes each, today, saves your family weeks later.

The afternoon checklist

You can clear most of this in one sitting. Print it, do it, and tell the people you named where to look.

What your executor still needs the old-fashioned way

Digital accounts are only half of it. To settle the rest of an estate in Canada, your executor will need the originals: the death certificate (banks reject photocopies, so the funeral home can provide several certified copies), the will, government photo identification, and usually a grant of probate that confirms their authority (TD's estate guide). Banks freeze a deceased person's sole accounts the moment they are notified, and nothing moves to beneficiaries until debts and final taxes are settled.

The quiet failure in all of this is discovery. Banks and courts can only deal with the accounts your executor knows about. If money sits in an online-only bank, a crypto wallet, or an inbox nobody can open, it is simply never found.

Where Archevi fits

We will be straight with you about what we do and do not solve here. Archevi cannot give your executor a legal right they do not have in your province, and no app can. What we can do is make the locked-out problem and the never-found problem disappear.

Archevi is one private place where your family keeps the things they would otherwise be hunting for: the will, the insurance policies, the account list, the passwords, the instructions. Every family member can ask a plain question ("where is Dad's life insurance policy?") and get the answer with the exact document attached. Your documents are stored on Canadian servers, and we never train AI on your files. When our assistant answers a question about them, the sensitive personal details are stripped out first.