The majority of Canadians adults say they don’t have a will, according to a new poll by the Angus Reid Institute.

A quarter of those polled in the online survey say they are too young to worry about it while 23 per cent said they don’t have enough assets to warrant a will. The poll was conducted from Dec. 20-21 among a random sample of 1,516 adults.

Of the Canadians who do have a will, only 25 per cent said the document is up to date, the poll revealed.

Not surprisingly, older Canadians were more likely to have a will in place, with those 55 and older four times more likely to have one than compared with the country’s youngest adults. There was an anomaly, however, in Atlantic Canada where its residents were less likely to have a will in place despite having the oldest population in the country.

British Columbia and Quebec were the only provinces where the majority of respondents said they have a will (54 per cent and 58 per cent, respectively).

In Ontario, over half (54 per cent) don’t have a will, which could be explained by the province’s slightly younger population. The median age in Ontario is 39.8, compared to a median age of 41.4 in B.C. and 41.5 in Quebec, according to Statistics Canada.

Women were less likely (46 per cent) to have a will in place than men (53 per cent), pointing to legal costs as the main reason for not having one.