Funeral Director urges North Huron Council to revise cemetery fee schedule
BY SCOTT STEPHENSON
On Monday, funeral director Dayna Deans came before North Huron Council to address some dramatic changes in the way that the township administered its cemetery fees last winter in the hopes that the situation can be quickly rectified before the coming winter.
Deans, who works at McBurney Funeral Home on Patrick Street in Wingham, explained to council why she had chosen to come and speak. “Basically, I’m here today on behalf of all the families that I look after. Obviously, people are not as well-versed in the cemetery bylaws as I am. They’re hopefully only dealing with it a couple of times in their life, but I feel it's my job to see that they’re looked after during a particularly vulnerable time in their life.”
She talked about the recent large increase in costs for all winter interments and inurnments, not just adult caskets. “Regardless of weather conditions, these fees are applied,” Deans pointed out. “Just for some context, a niche opening, which is taking four screws out of a wall, goes from $110 to $1,100. An infant casket opening goes from $360 to $1,350, cremated remains in a ground plot would also go from $360 to $1,350, and then a casket opening would increase from $715 to $1,705. These fees are higher, of course, if you live in Morris-Turnberry, or anything outside of North Huron.”
She went on to explain that a winter burial fee has always been included in the cemetery price list, but that the winter fee had always been in lieu of the standard fee, not added to it as a surcharge. On the cemetery price list that North Huron currently has posted on its website, under its Ground Interment section, it lists the price of burying the casket of an adult North Huron resident as $715, plus HST. Under its Extra Fees section, it lists the cost of a winter burial for a resident as being $990, plus HST. “So, you would charge the $990 instead of the $715.” Deans asserted that residents are now being charged both fees, for a total of $1,705.
There is no separate price listed in the Extra Fees section for the cost of a winter burial for infant caskets or cremated remains to be buried or placed in niches, though they all have their own individual price line in the cemetery price list. In Deans’ time as a funeral director, the $990 winter burial fee had not been applied to things like the placing of cremated remains in niches until last winter. “It was only ever applied to caskets,” she said. “Not to every single type of burial.”
She did note that the township seemed to have brought these rules into effect the previous year.
“I guess North Huron became a little more strict on this surcharge during the 2022/2023 winter. That was the first winter that I was, in my career, able to bury caskets all year round, so we had no extra fees. That was the winter that we had the crazy Christmas with a ton of snow, so obviously, we just got kind of lucky on when we had burials.” She let council know that all parties involved, including families, her staff and the caretakers, had been satisfied with how that season had gone.
Deans also outlined the ways in which extra effort had been put in that winter to avoid unnecessary burial costs. “Every family, I let them know that burials had to take place within the Public Works [Department’s] working hours, because I believe, in the winter, they go onto a different schedule.” In addition to avoiding overtime pay, they had also limited the number of vehicles allowed to go into the cemetery, for liability purposes, though she did point out that the roads in the cemetery are plowed throughout the winter anyway. “The other thing is, I made every family aware that if we booked the burial on Friday for Wednesday, and we got cold weather, or a ton of snow, there was always a chance that you might not be able to do the burial, and it would have to wait until spring.”
Another one of Deans’ climate-related concerns is the mausoleum, where caskets are stored over the winter, for a fee, as they await spring burial. “Something to know about the mausoleum is that it’s not designed with refrigeration in mind, it’s not designed as cold storage. It is only as cold as it is outside. We are not getting the winters that we used to get.” She also pointed out that it is often much easier to dig in November and December than it is in April, when the spring thaw has made the earth muddy and prone to cave-ins.
She also pointed out that the decision as to whether the fee needed to be applied or not had always been left to the discretion of the cemetery caretakers - if there were no additional costs incurred through equipment usage or overtime pay, no additional fee was charged to families. Last year, she said, that had changed. The surcharge is from Nov. 15, and we have not been able to have the Public Works Lead Hand use discretion on when that fee is charged. And, so, you’re having to wait six-plus months because of a date on a calendar, which makes it a little bit difficult... 2023 and into 2024 would have been the first year that North Huron was kind of set on charging this additional fee. I don’t believe any of my families paid it - I know there were people in situations that they wanted to bury and, unfortunately, it comes down to ‘your mother should have died two days earlier and you wouldn’t have had to pay $1,000 extra’.”
There are other things about the new interpretation of the fee structure and bylaws that Deans believes are unjust. “That surcharge doesn’t guarantee that burials are going to be completed all winter. Basically, North Huron has the right to say ‘O.K., Nov. 15, we’re charging you an extra $1,000, because. And it doesn’t matter what the weather is like. And then we’re going to stop burials whenever we deem it unsafe because of weather.”
She looked to North Huron Council and staff and put the issue to them directly. “I think if anybody sitting up here said that they agree with paying $1,000 more to take four screws out of a wall because it’s Nov. 20, I think you’re fooling yourself. I don’t think anybody can justify that.”
She urged council to put themselves in the situations that this strict surcharge enforcement has created. “In a perfect world, I would bury all 95-year-old men and women who had beautiful, long lives. But I deal with a lot of tragic circumstances, and, you know, if I have to tell a mother who just lost a child to suicide that we have to wait six months because of a calendar date, or to a mom that just lost her stillborn baby ‘you’ll have to wait six months until we can bury or pay $1,000,’ it’s pretty hard to justify.”
Deans also offered to provide council with some of her ideas on how this situation could be rectified going forward, using her understanding of the government-delegated authority that administers funerary services in this province - the Bereavement Authority of Ontario (BAO). “It’s different than some of the stuff municipalities have to run into,” she explained. “I know a lot of you up here have loved ones buried in Wingham Cemetery, and I talk about Wingham mostly because I’m not in Blyth as much, but it applies to both.”
Councillor Chris Palmer asked Deans how many winter burials she sees in an average winter. “So, in 2022/2023, me, just from my funeral home, had 18. We had five casketed remains, eight cremated remains in-ground, and five niches. And then this past winter that we just went through, I had eight casketed remains, 11 cremated remains, and two in the niche.” Palmer followed up by saying that he feels for those families. “We’ve all been in that situation, or will be. So, if there’s a compromise we could agree upon, it would either be one where the person has discretion, or we extend the dates - November, December, and call it at that point. We have to consider the labour side of it, and it’s really hard, because it’s that, and then the family side.”
Councillor Mitch Wright suggested that the cemetery caretakers be given the same discretion to close or open for the season that the manager of a golf course has. “I think it’s certainly something that should be fairly doable, is to, you know, postpone the start of the closure season if we’ve got good weather, and then therefore either we charge for closed rates or open rates but I don’t see that as being too hard of a call, to extend the open season.”
Councillor Anita van Hittersum asked McAllister if the cemetery bylaws could be changed by council alone, or if the BAO would need to be involved. McAllister replied, “My understanding is that we would need to post it for a four-week period, based on what the BAO says, like, in the newspapers, and circulation suppliers. From there, we’d have to have a proposal for a draft bylaw, which has to go to council, and then we have to take that draft bylaw to the BAO to review and provide their feedback. And then it has to be updated through the bylaw. So there is a bit of a process to that.”
When Palmer asked him if they should start by proposing a bylaw first, McAllister redirected the question towards Clerk Carson Lamb. “If council is desirous of providing amendments, my recommendation would be that your motion direct staff to amend the required bylaws, and leave it vague enough that you’re capturing that process, whatever that process looks like.”
Deans then pointed out that, while changing a bylaw under the BAO, the price list is a separate document from the bylaw, saying “Just like a funeral home - I can change my price list, and so can you... I don’t know what it entails from the municipality’s standpoint, and what you have to do, but that’s something that could work.”
Lamb explained that Deans was referring to the Fees and Charges Bylaw, saying, “That’s where those extra charges are noted. As council is aware, you go through that process every year, and we’ll be going through it very soon here in November, so you could update the fees there. The only thing I don’t have the answer to at this point is whether the Cemetery Bylaws establish that Nov. 15 to April 15. Because if it is, if you’re changing the actual date, you may need to update your Cemetery Bylaws, because that might not be reflected in your Fees and Charges Bylaw. It really depends on what direction council wants to provide to staff - whether you want to change those timelines, or whether you just want to change those fees.” McAllister put forth that those dates are set in the Cemetery Bylaw, not the Fees and Charges Bylaw.
McAllister did not read from a particular section of the Cemetery Bylaw to confirm this, but, according to Section E of the Cemetery Bylaws posted on North Huron’s website, it reads: “No interment shall be scheduled to take place between November 15th and April 15th of every year.” The passage then continues, stating, “However upon special request, an interment allowance can be made at the sole discretion of the cemetery manager and/or cemetery operator based on the site benefit, and resource availability. Interments scheduled from November 15th to April 15th can be subject to extra charges ontop (SIC) of the interment rates.”
Wright made a motion to direct staff to review the situation, and write a report with suggestions and options as to how things could be handled in terms of changing the dates, as they would be collectively reconsidering the fees in November. McBurney seconded the motion, which passed. Only van Hittersum and Deputy-Reeve Kevin Falconer did not raise their hand to support the motion.
Falconer, who had raised his hand to comment prior to the motion, asked why it had been brought to vote before the discussion had come to a close. “I thought we were still in the comment phase - I didn’t realize that had expired and a motion was going to be made,” he said to Reeve Paul Heffer. “But do with it what you wish, Sir Captain.”