Even if his motives were racist and distasteful, the curmudgeon must still have the last word on his own last will and testament.

Ontario’s highest court has reinstated the final wishes of Rector Eric Spence to disinherit a daughter who had an interracial son, reversing a controversial lower court ruling that set aside the Jamaican-born widower’s “racist” will because it offended public policy.

The appeal court said no one has the right to interfere with a person’s distribution of his own estate — even if it’s discriminatory or “repugnant.” Neither the Ontario Human Rights Code nor the Charter can dictate someone’s final, private, legal bequests.

Freedom at last — at least from the grave.

“A testator’s freedom to distribute her property as she chooses is a deeply entrenched common law principle,” wrote Justice Eleanore Cronk on behalf of the three-judge panel. “The common law principle of testamentary freedom thus protects a testator’s right to unconditionally dispose of her property and to choose her beneficiaries as she wishes, even on discriminatory grounds.”

Daughter Verolin Spence, 52, is “disappointed” by the court’s decision, her lawyer Michael Deverett said, and has instructed them to seek leave to appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada.

“You’ve got two very important principles bouncing off each other: One is testamentary freedom and one is racism and the court came down on the side of testamentary freedom,” said Deverett. “We’d like to hear if the Supreme Court has a different opinion.”

Spence left his $400,000 estate to a second daughter he hadn’t seen in 50 years and her two black sons. “I specifically bequeath nothing to my daughter, Verolin Spence, as she has had no communication with me for several years and has shown no interest in me as her father,” the Maple man wrote in his will before he died in 2013 at the age of 71.

Verolin went to court to argue that the real reason she’d been disinherited was due to her father’s shame in her having a child by a white man. A family friend backed up her claim, saying Spence often railed against her and her “white bastard son.”

Last year, a Newmarket judge sided with the man’s daughter and gave her half the estate. “It is clear and uncontradicted, in my view, that the reason for disinheriting Verolin, as articulated by the deceased, was one based on a clearly stated racist principle,” ruled Justice Cory Gilmore. “Does it offend public policy that the deceased’s other daughter, Donna, should receive the entire estate simply because her children were fathered by a black man? That, in my view, offends not only human sensibilities but also public policy.”

BMO Trust, the estate’s executor, asked the appeal court to reinstate the will, arguing the courts have no business interfering with someone’s last wishes or guessing as to the “real” reasons behind them. They also warned that the decision would open the floodgates to other disappointed beneficiaries claiming discrimination.

In rare cases, the judiciary has stepped in to set aside wills whose provisions offend public policy — for example, that of a New Brunswick man who left his estate to an illegal, white supremacist group. But this isn’t one of those cases, the appeal panel ruled.

“The court’s power to interfere with a testator’s testamentary freedom on public policy grounds does not justify intervention simply because the court may regard the testator’s testamentary choices as distasteful, offensive, vengeful or small-minded.”

As for the family friend’s evidence about Spence’s true motivation for disinheriting his daughter, the court of appeal said such “third-party evidence” shouldn’t have been admissible. “In my view, the courts should be loath to sanction such an indirect attack, which the deceased cannot challenge, on a testator’s expressed motive and testamentary choices,” Cronk wrote.

How refreshing. The courts may police our every move while we’re alive, but they’re willing to leave our dying wishes alone.

No matter how ugly or politically incorrect.