A British Columbia court has ruled against a woman who sought to revise her mother’s will to have her $1.8-million inheritance placed into a discretionary trust, in an effort to preserve her disability benefits.

The Supreme Court of B.C. denied an application from Kathryn Elizabeth Damgaard that sought to vary her mother’s will, which shared her estate equally between her three children, with each to receive at least $1.8 million.

According to the court’s decision posted Tuesday, Damgaard — who is unable to work, lives in social housing, and relies on disability benefits to fund her living expenses — asked the court to vary her mother’s will to put her share of the estate into a fully discretionary trust, known as a Henson trust, in order to preserve her access to disability benefits and social housing.

“If I receive a direct distribution from my mother’s estate, it will jeopardize my disability benefits and my eligibility for social housing,” court filings on her behalf noted.

By putting those assets into a trust — which would give trustees absolute discretion over the distribution of the trust’s assets, meaning that her interest in those assets is considered to be zero — she sought to preserve her eligibility for benefits.

The court said that to grant an application to vary a will, it must be satisfied that the will didn’t “make adequate provision for the maintenance or support” of the beneficiary.

In this case, Damgaard argued that, “by failing to put her interest into a Henson trust to preserve her benefits, the deceased did not make adequate provision for her maintenance and support.”

The court said that, while there’s no question that the deceased could have required that her disabled daughter’s inheritance be placed into a Henson trust, “the question is whether she breached her moral obligation by not doing so.”

Ultimately, the court concluded that failing to put the inheritance into a trust didn’t amount to a moral failure.

Among other things, it found that this is not a case where a child has been unfairly disinherited, and it said that the size of the estate argues against the claim that the will didn’t make adequate provision for Damgaard.

“I recognize that circumstances would undoubtedly be very different if the estate were modest, such that a direct distribution would disentitle her from receiving benefits and supports in the short term, only to return to needing those supports in relatively short order once the modest distribution had been exhausted,” the court said.

However, in this case, it said that, “If [Damgaard’s] share of the estate provides her with sufficient funds to meet all of her needs and a great many of her wants, without resort to publicly funded disability benefits, the provisions of the will may be entirely appropriate.”

It also noted that there was no evidence about “whether the concerns of receiving the inheritance directly could be ameliorated” with the help of a professional money manager.

As a result, it rejected the application to vary the will to require that the inheritance be put into a Henson trust.