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

Funeral directors in Thunder Bay, Ont.,are calling for changes to help address an industry worker shortage.

"This is definitely an issue with us here in the northwest, more so than other parts of Ontario," saidJohn-BryanGardiner, 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 who work in funeral homes, cemeteries, crematoriumsand 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 1 funeral director licence: Humber College in Toronto offers the course, while French students can attendCollege 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."

We're faced with either breaking the rules, at least the letter of the law, or turning families away.-John-Bryan Gardiner, Funeral director

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 licenseesand two support staffdue 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 northup the Kenorahighway and the Dryden highway and so on.

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

The Emo funeral home is operated by a single licenseeand has gone from looking after 100 families a year to 250 because of the Fort Frances closure, Gardiner said.

Kenora, Dryden, Sioux Lookout and Red Lake also have funeral homes with one licencee, Gardnier said.

Greg Sargent, co-owner of Thunder Bay's Blake Funeral Chapel and Sargent and Son Funeral Chapel, said the staffing shortage hasn't hit his operations, as "we have a great staff right now."

But Sargent said it's been difficult to attract new apprentices to the Thunder Bay area in recent years, and requiring people to study in southern Ontario is also causing problems.

"Thunder Bay does have people that are interested in becoming funeral directors, but they don't want to travel down to southern Ontario and move there for the year," he said. "A lot of times, people joining funeral services are on their second careers and they have family, so they don't want to move all the way down there to do their education."

A new approach to training?

As for solutions, Sargent said online learning would help attract more people to the profession.

"I think many of the funeral directors around here believe that if they offered an online platform, or maybe the students would go down to Toronto maybe once a month or once every two months to do any lab work they need to do, they would attract more students," he said. "That would result in more funeral directors available.

"The easier it is for folks to to become a funeral director in terms of getting the education, the better," he said."I think most apprentices learn most of their craft while they're doing their apprentice year. The in-school is just more of a theory based program."

Gardiner added a new approach to apprenticeship would also help.

"We need to get back to a true apprenticeship program, three years, four years, whatever, so that adult students can work in their home community, and employers can find employees," he said. "It's a win-win for everybody.But when you tell someone, 'Oh, well you have to uproot and move to Toronto for a year,' it just doesn't work, especially not for adults."

Gardiner said he'd also like to see regulations altered so support staff can perform more duties.

Specifically, staff who "don't necessarily have a license, but sure as heck know what they're doing. I've got some of those, they could run funerals without me, but it wouldn't be legal."

Allan Cole, president of the Funeral Service Association of Canada, said that organization is working to raise awarenessof opportunities in the industry.

"We've even looked at the veteran community," Cole said."We thought with the number of military personnel that are exiting the military every year, there might be opportunities in which someone might look at it and say, 'well funeral service is a career path that never occurred to me before, but I might consider that.'

"We've tried to attract veterans by providing perhaps scholarship opportunities, and things like that, to get someone to actively think about considering funeral service as a career," he said. "An active effort is being made to address this."

In an interview with CBC News, Holland said he's contacted the Ministry of Public and Business Service Delivery, which oversees the BAO, and is working to set up a meeting between Gardiner and ministry officials.

"We're just trying to coordinate with Mr. Gardiner, of course, and the ministry staff," Holland said. "So it's not anything that we're ignoring. Ifully appreciate Mr. Gardiner's frustrations.

"I've heard from so many people in so many industries that they have the work, but they just can't find the people," Holland said. "So it's a challenge."