Bill 27 - Funeral Services Amendment Act
October 28, 2008 - Second Reading
Ms Blakeman: Well, Mr. Speaker, this is another bill that I’ve recently inherited as critic. To be honest with you, I haven’t been able to read to the end of the actual bill, so I’m having to wing it a bit here. But this is what you get for being in a…
Mr. Hayden: She wants to make sure she’s looked after when she dies.
Ms Blakeman: I’m getting encouragement here from the Minister of Infrastructure. I guess that scares me a little.
What I’m getting from my first go at this bill is that it is a reworking and addressing of a number of administrative changes that needed to happen to the bill. To be honest with you, I’m not sure when was the last time this was updated. It’s showing revised statutes of 2000, when we sort of generally updated everything, but that doesn’t tell us how long this stuff all sat here.
Dr. Taft: That was the last time, I believe.
Ms Blakeman: Yeah, but everything got updated in 2000.
You know, funeral services are one of those things that have sort of gotten a bad rap recently. It’s a favourite place to go hunting for storylines for crime investigator television programs and things. It’s a bit of the unknown mixed in with a fear of indignities mixed in with that we’re all going to have to go there. People don’t like to talk about what’s happening here.
In fact, the profession itself has also suffered some bad press, if I can put it that way, has also turned up in some good and bad literary plots. Some people compare funeral directors and funeral companies to the dredges of society, right down there with politicians and lawyers and used car salesmen. [interjection] I know. Not the order I would put things in, but we’re just generally acknowledging those terrible jokes that society plays on certain professions.
It’s unfortunate because it is an area that’s delicate. It’s tough to talk to people about, “What’s going to happen when you die?” and “Can you please make some decisions about that?” I’ve tried to be a grown up, a good adult child and talk about this with both of my parents, and there’s a real reluctance to do this. I don’t know whether it’s because as a parent they don’t want to distress their child by talking about the day when they won’t be here – that may well be what some of the reluctance is – or just a generational distaste for discussing this. I don’t know. But it can be tough to get people to speak openly about funeral arrangements. Have they done it? What did they prepay? Where has it been done? Then you get into all the family stuff: “What do you mean you bought a plot there? She was a pioneer, and she should be in the pioneer graveyard in Millarville. There’s no way she should be buried in this awful spot somewhere else.” You get all of the other family stuff mixed into it, and it’s sort of a big, messy stew of very strong feelings and hesitations and fears that all get mixed together.
We’re trying to be grown-ups here. We’re trying to provide legislation that will clarify and also promote a confidence in this particular sector. Let’s face it; this sector is changing. You know, everybody used to die and be cared for at home. There used to be a lying in at home, a wake in the front parlour. Then it was moved into the churches of the community. Now it has moved from the churches into the – I’m trying to remember the phrase.
Dr. Taft: Funeral homes?
Ms Blakeman: The funeral homes. Thank you. In some cases they’re called memorial centres. There’s another word that’s being used a lot more now. People have a memorial, not a funeral. So the whole way that we mark somebody’s death and move them through those various stages to putting them in the ground, if that’s what happens to them, has changed quite a bit over one person’s lifetime, actually.
There is an attempt in this bill to address a number of those things where it is perceived there are some issues. There’s a lot of good stuff that’s being dealt with here. I can just very quickly run through some of the things. The ability to compel a business to cancel a prepaid funeral contract if they’re requested to do so by the people that are named. I mean, they go through and say: someone that organized this on someone else’s behalf, that individual’s behalf themselves, and there’s another list of who can cancel this funeral contract if they request to do so. The income that’s earned on any money, trust deposits from prepaid contracts, would be kept in trust until that funeral is performed or the contract is cancelled or the money is refunded. So it’s addressing all these little things, but they all start to add up.
Authorizing the director of funeral services to designate trust corporations, prohibiting solicitation of consumers for the purpose of transferring prepaid contracts, permitting the director to sanction funeral service businesses by placing conditions on their licences. I mean, this is all addressing various issues and problems that have come up in the past, so it’s largely an administrative bill.
There are a number of administrative sections, talking about adding filing fees and that sort of thing. A publication section about publishing information about funeral businesses that have been disciplined and disclosing that to other jurisdictions so that we don’t have somebody that sets up a fraudulent business and gets caught here just move on to somewhere else, and we can’t tell them that that’s what happened here.
A penalty clause. Liability protection that’s given to the Funeral Services Regulatory Board and extending that liability protection to members of the appeal board. Then, as usual, the government’s all time favourite: regulation-making ability, giving additional powers to the minister to do just about anything they want. There are a number of things that are included under that, including, again, a fee structure.
A couple of things had popped out to me as I started to read through this. The first one for me appears in the amendment of the bill, section 4, which is amending section 3. It’s talking about the duties and functions of the business manager as prescribed by the regulations unless that person holds a business manager licence.
What is this licence? Is there a criteria that goes with this, or is this just another way of extracting a fee out of somebody? If I could get the sponsor of the bill to answer that for me, I’d be a little happier.
Then section 18.7, appearing on page 21 of the act. There’s a special circumstances provision there which I’m kind of interested in. What’s being anticipated here? It’s despite any provision in this act. Then it goes on to say that an inspector can during an investigation enter premises and seize all documents and other things that they think they have reasonable grounds to take. Why does this special section need to be in there? It’s clearly around a delay involved in obtaining an order under sections 18.2 or 18.6 that could result in a loss or destruction of evidence. Why is this so important?
I’m just interested when sort of extraordinary powers are given, especially to enter somebody’s premises and to collect documents from them. If I can get a more expanded explanation of what’s happening there because I’m wondering if this is about going into someone’s house that it would be considered to be special circumstances or that somehow they think somebody is absconding. Why can’t the normal process of getting a court order to enter and seize suffice here? Why is the act setting out this special provisions section?
One of the things that I was looking for when I started was to see if there was an inequity being created here that would advantage the traditional providers of funeral services and disadvantage some of the newer and different providers of services that were coming into the business now. You know, we have some that are more involved in an environmentally different way of providing funeral services.
A couple of other things I’ve seen in the media and talked about, and I thought: well, I wonder if this is a way to just entrench the old way of doing it so that the existing providers of funeral services are sort of protected; they protect their turf. But that doesn’t seem to be what’s happening in this bill at all. It does seem to be a genuine review of things that needed to be addressed that have come up over the years since it was last looked at; in other words, an evergreening of the legislation.
One of the things that did catch my eye is section 3, which is amending section 2 by striking out “or to a mutual benefit society.” Why is that being removed? As far as I know, there are still mutual benefit societies around, so why does the act not apply to this? Essentially, what it’s striking out is this last bit that says, “This Act does not apply to a fraternal society licensed under the Insurance Act or to a mutual benefit society.” It’s the mutual benefit society that’s being struck from the act, and I wonder why. Are they covered somewhere else in a different act? Are they covered under the Insurance Act? Or have mutual benefit societies done some terrible thing that they don’t deserve to be included in this act? I just wonder why it is taken out, especially because mutual benefit societies to me are more like co-ops, so they tend to be a kind of group of people that have come together for a common purpose. It’s the sort of thing that I would generally support, so I’m a little concerned when I see them being written out of the legislation. I’m sure the sponsor of the bill can give me a good answer as to why that’s happening.
As I say, I haven’t been able to review this as thoroughly as I would like. I know that some of my colleagues will speak to the bill, but we will need more time to do a more thorough examination of this. We’ll do the best we can with it today, but I’m hoping that we will adjourn it. That will give some of my colleagues a bit more time to catch up on this one. I mean, the bills that we’re trying to review now are coming at us pretty thick and fast. The last one I talked to was over a hundred pages. This one is 28 pages. We just can’t keep up with them. We don’t have enough staff to run as fast as they need to on this one although they’re certainly running fast.
Those are the comments I’m able to offer at this time. I apologize that it’s not as thorough as I would like it to be, but I just need more time to examine the rest of the act.
Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker.
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