CLI PEI Power of Attorney Kit Discontinued

For years, the go-to resource for setting up a power of attorney on Prince Edward Island was the low-cost paper kit sold by the Community Legal Information Association of PEI (CLI). It was affordable, plain-language, and trusted across the Island. Then on November 1, 2025, CLI pulled every POA kit from circulation.

If you used a CLI kit in the past, or you are searching for one now, here is what happened and what your options are.

Why CLI Withdrew the Kits

On November 1, 2025, the Powers of Attorney and Personal Directives Act (Cap. P-16.1) came into force, repealing the old Powers of Attorney Act that the CLI templates were built around. The new legislation introduced fundamentally different requirements — new statutory forms (Form 1 for simple POA, Form 2 for detailed POA, Form 3 for personal directives), stricter witnessing rules under Section 32, a ten-year criminal lookback for proposed attorneys and agents, and mandatory service provider verification protocols.

CLI's legacy templates could not be patched to comply. The forms, the execution instructions, and the witness requirements all changed. CLI's website now explicitly warns that documents completed using older kits do not comply with current law and should not be relied upon.

What Happens if You Already Used an Old CLI Kit

If you or a family member executed a power of attorney using a pre-November 2025 CLI template, that document is built on repealed legislation. The practical consequences depend on when you need to use it:

If the document was executed under the old Act before November 1, 2025, CLI warns that documents completed using older kits should not be relied upon. Banks and credit unions operating under the new Section 29 verification mandates will scrutinize it heavily. Many institutions are defaulting to rejection when they see an unfamiliar form that does not match the current statutory templates.

If you completed the old CLI template after November 1, 2025, the document does not comply with the active law. It is invalid.

Either way, the safest path is to execute a new set of documents under the current Act — especially if you anticipate needing the POA in the near future.

What Replaced CLI's Kit

CLI has not released an updated kit as of mid-2026. Their public guidance directs Islanders to consult a lawyer. For many PEI families — particularly those in rural Kings and Prince County, or seniors living on fixed pensions — that advice runs headlong into two realities: PEI has a severe shortage of estate planning lawyers, and custom legal drafting routinely costs several hundred dollars or more.

The alternatives are:

National automated platforms like Willful, LegalWills, or Epilogue generate province-specific templates online. They handle basic document creation but typically do not address the post-execution challenges that cause the most problems on PEI — how to satisfy Section 29 service provider verification, how to navigate the Registry of Deeds for real property, or what to do when a credit union rejects your paperwork.

The government's statutory forms (Forms 1, 2, and 3) are available in the Powers of Attorney and Personal Directives Regulations. They are free, but they are raw legal templates without explanatory context. They do not explain how to structure springing conditions, how to coordinate a financial POA with a personal directive and a health care directive, or how to handle the Section 32 witness eligibility rules that trip up most families.

The Gap CLI Left Behind

CLI's kits were valuable not because the paper template itself was sophisticated, but because they came with plain-language guidance that walked families through execution step by step. The template was the smallest part of the package — the context around it was what prevented mistakes.

That context is what is missing from both the government forms and the automated online platforms. Knowing which form to fill out is straightforward. Knowing that your sister-in-law cannot witness because she is a family member of the named attorney, knowing that PEI does not allow video witnessing, knowing that a non-enduring POA dies the moment your parent loses capacity — these are the execution-level details where families make fatal errors.

The Prince Edward Island Power of Attorney Kit was built specifically to fill this gap: step-by-step plain-language guidance aligned to the active 2025 legislation, with a Section 32 execution checklist, service provider verification package, and fiduciary accounting tools that CLI's kit never included.

See more Prince Edward Island guides →