The Court held that a 1989 voluntary transfer of property from parents to their six children, accompanied by oral conditions that the property be preserved and rental income applied for the parents' benefit during their lifetimes, gave rise to an automatic resulting trust in favour of the parents because the conditions were insufficiently certain to create an enforceable express trust and the transfer was not an absolute gift. The presumption of advancement (parent-to-child) was insufficient to rebut the resulting trust where the evidence — including the transferors' ongoing management, the children's shared understanding of binding conditions, the accounting treatment of rental income, and the family circumstances at the time of transfer — all pointed against an unconditional gift. On costs, the Court applied the probate analogy that where the settlors' failure to document the trust terms caused the litigation, all parties including unsuccessful claimants were entitled to costs out of the trust fund on the ordinary basis, but the plaintiffs as former trustees were not entitled to indemnity costs under UCPR r 42.25 where they had acted in their own interests by asserting they were not trustees.
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