Ontario's shift toward virtual coroner's inquests scoops in high-profile case

Mackenzie Peterson gets that we live in an era when so many things happen online. She just doesn't think the coroner's inquest into her father's death should have been one of them.

Four years ago, Hamilton police officers shot her dad, Jason Peterson. The 42-year-old was armed and wanted to die by police, according to his family. After he pointed a gun at officers, police shot him and he died in hospital the next day. 

Ontario's police watchdog cleared the officers of wrongdoing, so there was no trial.

When the inquest was announced, it seemed like Mackenzie's chance to sit in the same room and come face-to-face with the officer who took her father's life. 

But like a growing number of coroner's inquests in the province, the public deep dive into her father's death unfolded virtually.

Mackenzie and her family, the presiding officer, the jury, witnesses, lawyers, and other inquest participants were linked together by video conference. 

After Mackenzie's opening statement from her home in Hamilton, her camera was turned off — and it stayed that way, she said, until the family complained.

"Look, if this was happening in the courtroom, you couldn't block our faces," Mackenzie's grandmother Lucy recalled saying at the time.

The inquest also experienced technical issues like witnesses' screens cutting out, they said. 

At one point the Petersons had to notify their lawyer they hadn't been placed in a breakout room. It felt, Mackenzie said, almost as if this was the first time Ontario's Office of the Chief Coroner was conducting a remote inquest.

"[The] only good thing I could say is I [didn't] have to pay for parking," she said, adding that if Ontario proceeds with virtual inquests, it needs to do some fine-tuning. 

"And not make us, the people that are grieving the most, feel like we're kind of an outcast."

Coroner's inquests are not legal processes. They're fact-finding missions meant to classify the nature of a person's death, with jurors asked to make non-binding recommendations to prevent similar deaths in the future.

For decades, they've taken place in Ontario courtrooms and other physical settings, assembling all the players who were involved in or touched by a death in one spot.