Saskatchewan’s digital assets law: what your executor can and cannot access

What the Act is

The Fiduciaries Access to Digital Information Act, SS 2020, c 6, came into force in Saskatchewan on 29 June 2020. It is one of the first comprehensive Canadian statutes addressing how a fiduciary may access the digital assets of someone who has died, become incapable, or appointed them under a power of attorney or trust.

Before it, executors occupied an awkward position. They plainly had authority over the estate’s property, but service providers routinely refused access to accounts, citing their own terms of service and privacy legislation. The Act was written to resolve that standoff.

Who counts as a fiduciary

• Executors and administrators — the person managing an estate after death.
• Attorneys under a power of attorney — someone you appoint to manage your affairs while you are alive.
• Guardians and property decision-makers — appointed where an adult can no longer manage their own affairs.
• Trustees — administering a trust for a beneficiary.

What "digital asset" covers

The definition is deliberately broad: information stored on computers and other digital devices; content uploaded to websites, from photographs to documents; and rights in digital property, such as domain names and entitlements associated with online accounts.

Cryptocurrency sits inside that definition comfortably enough as a matter of law. The difficulty is not classification. It is that crypto behaves unlike every other asset in the list.

The default access rule

The Act creates a default: a fiduciary has access to the digital assets of the person they act for, to the same extent that person had, subject to what the will, power of attorney or trust actually says.

That last clause is the important one. Your own instruments override the default. If you want to restrict what an executor may see — personal correspondence, say, while granting full access to financial holdings — that has to be written down. Silence means the default applies.

The limit that matters most

Here is where crypto separates itself from everything else the Act contemplates.

For an email account, a cloud drive or a domain registration, there is a company on the other side. The Act gives your executor standing to compel that company to grant access. The mechanism works because someone has the thing and can be required to hand it over.

Self-custodied cryptocurrency has no such company. The keys are the asset. If nobody holds them, there is nobody to compel.

An executor armed with a grant of probate, a court order and the full authority of the statute still cannot move a single satoshi without the private key. The Act governs authority. It has nothing to say about capability, and no legislature can close that gap, because the constraint is cryptographic rather than legal.

This is the practical failure point in most crypto estates. The paperwork is in order. The authority is unambiguous. The assets are unreachable.

What to do about it

1. Address digital assets explicitly in your will and in any power of attorney, rather than relying on the statutory default. What to include, and what never to include.
2. Build a documented access path that operates independently of the will — so authority and capability arrive together. Multi-signature arrangements are the usual answer for meaningful holdings.
3. Keep it current and test it. A plan that matched your holdings two years ago may not match them now.

Common questions