There are two ways your family and friends can help you with your transaction — by being a trusted helper, or by acting as your attorney under a Power of Attorney (“POA”). There’s an important difference between the two: one offers support, the other carries legal signing authority. Here’s how each works.
A Trusted Helper: Support, Not Signing Authority
A trusted helper — a friend, family member, or neighbour — can sit with you, help you navigate the technology, and be part of the conversation. With your permission, we’re also happy to share updates and information with them.
A trusted helper cannot sign legal documents on your behalf. Helping you get to an appointment, or helping you use a phone, doesn’t give someone the legal authority to act for you. If you need someone else to sign documents for you, that person must be formally appointed as your attorney under a POA — see below.
Using a Power of Attorney: When Someone Signs For You
If you need someone else to actually sign documents on your behalf, they need to be named as your attorney in a valid POA.
Get Us the Original POA as Early as Possible
We need to see the actual original document — not a photocopy, scan, or photo. It also needs to be completely intact and untampered with: no missing pages, no re-stapled sections, no whiteout or alterations of any kind.
The earlier you bring it to us, the earlier we can catch problems, including:
- Names on the POA that don’t match the property title
- Signs of tampering or alteration
- Incorrect or missing signatures
- Missing or incomplete witnessing
These issues take time to sort out — sometimes requiring a new document entirely — so the sooner we see the original, the more room we have to fix anything before it holds up your transaction.
Problems Are More Common Than You’d Think — That’s Why We Check Carefully
Almost everyone who brings us a POA is confident it’s in perfect order. In our experience, that isn’t always the case — and it’s rarely anyone’s fault. It’s simply an older document that hasn’t been looked at closely until now. Some of the most common issues we run into:
- A signature or witness signature is missing
- The document has come apart at some point and been re-stapled or reassembled, which raises questions about whether every page is still in its original order
- Someone else is named on the document alongside you — a co-attorney — and that person has since passed away, become incapable of acting, can’t be located, or was never actually told they were named
- The name on the POA doesn’t quite match the legal name on the property title (a maiden name, a missing middle name, a spelling difference)
None of these mean the document is worthless, but each one needs to be worked through — sometimes with a quick fix, sometimes with a new document altogether. This is exactly why timing matters so much. If we find a problem the week before your completion date, there may not be enough time left to resolve it. If we find it weeks or months ahead, we usually have options.
What Happens to the Original Depends on the Property’s Registry
Different property registries have different rules for how we handle your POA. Here’s what to expect based on your situation:
| Property Type | What We Need to Do | When You Get the Original Back |
|---|---|---|
| First Nations Registry properties | We make a Certified True Copy (CTC) from your original, and submit the CTC with the registration paperwork. | Right away, once we’ve made the CTC. |
| Manufactured Home Registry properties | We make a CTC and keep it on hand — we don’t need to submit it, just confirm we have it. | Right away, once we’ve made the CTC. |
| Land Title Office properties | The Land Title and Survey Authority requires us to keep your original POA until they’ve finished registering it. | Once the Land Title Office has completed registration — this can take several weeks. |
Because that last category can mean being without your original document for a while, the earlier you get it to us, the sooner we can get it back to you.