Funeral directors call for changes to offset staff shortage in northwestern Ontario

Funeral directors in Thunder Bay are calling for changes to help address a worker shortage.

"This is definitely an issue with us here in the northwest, more so than other parts of Ontario," said John-Bryan Gardiner, president and managing funeral director with Everest Funeral Chapel in Thunder Bay.

"Other parts of Ontario, there's a larger staffing pool to draw from," he said. "The other thing is too, the legislation is very, very strict as to how we can function."

"In the absence of enough licensees, we literally are not allowed to look after families. We can't do our job. And so we're faced with either breaking the rules, at least the letter of the law, or turning families away."

Gardiner said it's not just funeral services themselves that are affected by the shortage; licenced funeral directors also respond to deaths, with someone on-call 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

"We are the ambulance service for the dead," he said. "We're the ones that get called out of bed in the middle of the night to go to the suicide scene,. the overdose, the homicide, the truck accident, car wreck on the highway."

Employees in Ontario's bereavement sector — those who work in funeral homes, cemeteries, crematoriums, and provide transfer services — are regulated by the Bereavement Authority of Ontario (BAO) under the Funeral Burial and Cremation Services Act 2002.

There are two colleges in Ontario that offer the one-year course required for someone to get their class one funeral director licence: Humber College in Toronto offers the course, while French students can attend College Boreal in Sudbury. The course is then followed by a one-year internship.

"Non-licensed staff, support staff, are crucial to our profession," Gardiner said. "However, anything they do falls back on the licensee that's supervising them. I can't be the only licensee around and then decide, 'well, I'm going to go to the lake for the weekend.' That's not properly supervising my staff."

Gardiner has met with Kevin Holland, MPP for Thunder Bay-Atikokan, about the issue, and sent follow-up letters on the matter to Holland's office.

In a latter dated Feb. 23, Gardiner states Everest had recently lost two licencees, and two support staff, due to overload and burnout, bringing his own staff shortage to a critical level.

And the issue is not only affecting Thunder Bay, Gardiner said.

"The funeral home in Fort Frances closed last summer," he said. "That funeral home served from Atikokan all the way through to Rainy River and north up the Kenora highway and the Dryden highway and so on."

"All those families now have to go to the funeral home in Emo."