The estate can keep operating the pharmacy, but only for a fixed statutory window that starts running from the date of death — four years, under the Drug and Pharmacies Regulation Act — and the deadline is different, and less flexible, depending on whether the deceased owned the pharmacy personally or through a corporation.
Short answer
The estate can keep operating the pharmacy, but only for a fixed statutory window that starts running from the date of death — four years, under the Drug and Pharmacies Regulation Act — and the deadline is different, and less flexible, depending on whether the deceased owned the pharmacy personally or through a corporation.
Where the deceased owned the pharmacy personally, section 145(2) applies: “Upon the death of a pharmacist who was owning and operating a pharmacy at the time of his or her death, the personal representative of such deceased person may own and operate the pharmacy for a period of four years or for such further period as the Council may authorize” That clock has a release valve — Council can authorize a further period.
Where the pharmacy is owned through a corporation, a different provision governs, and it is not about who may operate the pharmacy at all — it is about whether the corporation still satisfies the ownership test that keeps its own certificate valid. Section 142(3) provides that “shares registered in the name of the personal representative of a deceased pharmacist shall, for a period not exceeding four years, be considered to be registered in the name of a pharmacist” That deeming period has no extension power on its face: if the shares are still registered to the estate when it expires, the corporation stops satisfying the ownership test, and cannot lawfully continue to own or operate the pharmacy.
Section 145(3) requires the estate to “immediately upon becoming so authorized file with the Registrar evidence of the person's authority” immediately on becoming authorized to operate. That filing gives a buyer, or anyone else assessing the estate’s timeline, a documented start date for the clock — unlike most succession sales, where the seller’s real urgency is private.
A corporately-owned store is best sold by way of shares before the s.142(3) deadline runs, since a share purchase puts the shares directly into a holder that satisfies the ownership test and stops the clock. A personally-owned store is sold as an asset purchase, with the buyer applying for its own certificate of accreditation. Pricing both stores as one asset on one timeline, without checking which capacity the deceased held each in, is the mistake this pair of provisions punishes.
The full negotiation this deadline produced is in Treadstone Academy’s Case Files: an estate holding one pharmacy personally and one through a corporation, pricing each against its own statutory clock and the general rule that a pharmacy’s certificate is issued per premises, which is what a buyer’s asset purchase runs into here.
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