Funeral homes that have not been approved by the Alberta government will no longer be used to transport bodies in rural areas, except in rare circumstances.
Vendors will now be pre-qualified to ensure their staff have passed criminal record checks and that they have the proper vehicles to do the job, MLAs on the legislature’s public accounts committee were told Tuesday.
Officials said exceptions will be made only in cases of mass fatalities, when a body has to be removed from the side of a mountain, or when the family wants the body of a loved one released to the funeral home of their choice.
The government plans to track whenever companies that are not contracted are used. Police will be given an updated list of prequalified vendors each week.
“Investigators are also asked to fully document occasions when a non-pre-qualified vendor is used so that we can ensure that they are following the guidelines,” Philip Bryden, Alberta’s deputy minister of justice, told the committee.
The change was made at the end of September in response to a scathing report released last July by the office of the provincial auditor general.
Auditors found the office of the chief medical examiner continued to use companies that had not been contracted or approved 29 per cent of the time, two years after deciding they should all be under contract.
The government received complaints about staff with criminal records transporting bodies and funeral home employees taking photos of crime scenes for personal use.
Many bodies transported to the medical examiner’s offices in Calgary and Edmonton are of homicide victims. The auditor general said the practice of using unapproved companies exposed the government to risk.
Of the roughly 95 companies that could do the work, 30 have already passed pre-qualification and another 25 are undergoing the process.
Bryden couldn’t say the others haven’t started the pre-qualification process. He suggested they may believe they won’t get enough business to bother with the paperwork.
Funeral home association talks
The goal is to have pre-qualified vendors no more than 100 kilometres apart. However, acting chief medical officer of health Dr. Elizabeth Brooks-Lim said there will be service gaps until the process is completed.
“As those gaps start to fill up, we will hope that the vendor community will realize that we are aiming to only use contracted vendors except in very exceptional circumstances,” she said.
A CBC News investigation found that in 2012, then-chief medical examiner Dr. Anny Sauvageau tried to put the rural companies under contract to control costs and to ensure they followed uniform standards.
Documents obtained by CBC News showed the Alberta Funeral Service Association rejected the initial contract, mainly due to the issue of fees.
Jonathan Denis, the justice minister at the time, met with the association. Talks between the department and the funeral service association were reopened and a revised contract was negotiated.
The documents show the association was allowed to sign off on the wording of the contract before it was released for public tender.
Auditor General Merwan Saher does not consider these actions evidence of political interference. He told MLAs on Tuesday the department’s actions were a “rational response” since the association was not consulted prior to drafting the first contract.
In the future, the department and chief medical examiner will consult with the industry but Brooks-Lim told the committee there is fine line that must be watched.
“There is a careful balance that OCME (Office of the Chief Medical Examiner) acknowledges between listening to a vendor community and allowing too much influence from the vendor community to write a PQR contract,” she said.
Brooks-Lim said she has met with the funeral service association several times this year. She said some of their concerns will be reflected in the request for pre-qualifications that will go out in January.
She wasn’t immediately available to explain the changes,