When I wrote my recent Substack “Riddle Me This: Life, Death and the Burden of Proof”[1], the central tension remained unresolved. The law had declared a man dead. The evidence suggested otherwise. The question was whether the system would prioritize certainty or reality.
We now have the answer.
The Supreme Court of Canada has dismissed the appeal in Riddle v. Ivari[2], leaving intact the decision of the Quebec Court of Appeal[3]. In doing so, it has endorsed a simple but consequential proposition: a declaration of death is not immune from correction. Where credible, reliable evidence establishes that the individual is alive, the law must yield. The Court confirmed that the question is determined on a balance of probabilities, and that physical return is not required where the evidence establishes that the person is alive.
As I discussed in my original blog, that result carries weight beyond the facts of the case.
For insurers, it challenges the assumption that death claims, once paid, are truly final. The possibility, however remote, of later evidence emerging from outside the jurisdiction introduces residual risk into death claims that the industry has traditionally treated as closed.
For estates, it unsettles what has traditionally been treated as firm ground. Executors act on declarations of death to gather assets, satisfy liabilities, and make distributions. If that underlying declaration can be revisited, so too can the steps taken in reliance on it.
And for those of us who work in the space between litigation and resolution, the case reinforces what anyone who mediates these cases already knows. Disputes grounded in uncertain or evolving facts do not become stable simply because time has passed. They remain fluid, and that fluidity creates both risk and opportunity.
The Supreme Court did not eliminate the tension identified in the original piece. It resolved it in favour of accuracy. The law may impose order where facts are missing, but it cannot insist on that order once the facts come into view.
The riddle, it turns out, was never whether the law could declare someone dead. It was whether it could admit it was wrong.
And correct itself.
[2] 2026 SCC 9, online: https://decisions.scc-csc.ca/scc-csc/scc-csc/en/item/21464/index.do
[3] https://www.canlii.org/fr/qc/qcca/doc/2023/2023qcca1111/2023qcca1111.html