Grieving families call out Quebec for ‘inhumane’ death certificate delay

When Lauma Cenne’s husband died at the end of December, she planned a private memorial service for April.

By then, she figured, she’d have his death certificate and be on the way to settling his affairs.

But nearly three months after his death, she’s still waiting.

“It’s just inhumane,” said Cenne.

Cenne’s husband, Michael Pinsonneault, was a prolific musician and a professor at Concordia University. He died from a rare form of appendix cancer.

Initially, Cenne said the funeral home told her it would take four to six weeks to obtain a death certificate and she was encouraged when the province debited her account for the application fee at the end of January.

“I thought, ‘Oh, cool, they’re processing it, it’ll be sometime in February or mid-February’,” said Cenne.

But when March rolled around and she still hadn’t received it, she got in touch with the funeral home again, which informed her the province is only now processing deaths from the beginning of December.

“This is absurd,” said Cenne.

Without Pinsonneault’s death certificate, she can’t liquidate his assets. She can’t complete his taxes, receive his death benefit or open an account to deposit his estate cheques, all of which has put a big strain on her finances.

“All through February, every evening I’m looking at the bank account even though I know nothing’s changing. I’ve done the math 40 times. It’s added stress that’s not needed,” said Cenne, who gave up her job to care for Pinsonneault for about six months before his death.

“I just feel like I am waiting for a guillotine to drop,” she said. “I’ve had to borrow money to keep paying my mortgage.”

Long delays compared to other provinces

This is not the first time grieving Quebec families have called out the province for long wait times.

For most of 2019, a backlog at the government’s Directeur de l’état civil, or registrar of civil status — the agency responsible for registering births, marriages and death — meant many families waited up to four months for a death certificate.

A death certificate is an essential document an executor needs to access a deceased person’s money, pay off funeral expenses, stop bill payments or cancel anything from cable service to car insurance.

Solidarity tax credits, social assistance and Quebec pension plan payments also continue until the person’s death is registered, which then have to be reimbursed by the estate’s executor.

In the summer of 2019, the minister in charge of the civil registrar, Jean Boulet, blamed a series of organizational changes and a shortage of workers for the delays.

He promised to hire more staff to bring the wait times back down to normal levels, which is about 10 days.

By January 2020, the province appeared to have made good on that promise and funeral homes were reporting a big improvement in wait times.

Fast forward to 2024.

According to the ministry, it now takes, on average, 40 to 45 working days to register a death in Quebec. Those delays were relatively consistent throughout 2023 as well.

That wait time does not include holidays, weekends or any extra research that may be required if documents are incomplete or don’t match what the civil registry has on file.

Once the death is registered, the death certificate is delivered almost immediately for fast-track applications and eight days for normal processing.

In western Canada, the average processing time for a death certificate is much shorter.

According to British Columbia’s Ministry of Health, it takes less than 10 days on average to register a death. Once it is registered, the Vital Statistics Agency can issue a death certificate within two to five business days.

If the funeral home registers the death, they can print a death certificate immediately.

Alberta’s wait times are similar to B.C.’s.

Unlike Quebec, it is generally enough in Ontario to have the proof-of-death certificate signed by a licensed funeral director when it comes to settling an estate, said Jay Branton, the managing director of Dignity Memorial Funeral Homes in Ontario.

“That’s typically good for Ontario/Canadian banking and real estate transactions,” said Branton, who lost his own father in August of last year. “It was good for everything that we had to do — pensions, banking, that type of thing.”

There are exceptions if the person has a cumbersome estate, large real estate transactions or has to go to court.

In those cases, Branton said a certified copy of a death certificate from the province is necessary and that can take up to 12 weeks. Once the death is registered, it takes another two or three weeks to get the long-form death certificate. Ontario also offers an online service where people can check the status of their application.

Estate lawyer Marilyn Piccini Roy said she remembers when it was enough to proceed with just a funeral director’s proof of death in Quebec too.

But when the Civil Code of Quebec came into force in 1994, the civil status registry was created.

“Most of the banks and financial institutions began to require what we call the official death certificate,” said Piccini Roy, a partner and the head of estates, wills and trusts group at Robinson Sheppard Shapiro LLP in Montreal. “It became much more explicit in the law.”

In addition to what she has noticed in her practice, she too has had personal experience with long wait times for a death certificate and suspects there is a staffing problem.

No ‘logic’ to long waits

Notary Liat Lev Ary says Quebec’s hiring blitz back in 2019 helped — albeit temporarily.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, she remembers the wait time for a death certificate in Quebec was down to a few days. But it’s fluctuated wildly since then — anywhere from a month to more than three months, said Lev Ary.

She’s seen firsthand how the holdup can put an emotional and financial strain on families.

“Most of my clients are very frustrated because nobody will let them do anything without the death certificate. Not the banks. Not the accountant to file taxes,” she said.

People want to avoid paying penalties if they don’t file their taxes on time and are nervous about paying interest on car loans or other bills.

Even a simple will search is not possible without the death certificate.

“The attestation from the funeral home has no legal value,” said Lev Ary.

Jane Blanchard handles death certificate applications for clients at Montreal’s Kane and Fetterly funeral home.

Despite the hundreds of applications she handles a year, Blanchard hasn’t detected a pattern to why some applications come back quickly and others linger for months.

“There’s no logic,” said Blanchard.

But she has noticed the registry is asking for information and details it didn’t seem to require before.

“Now they’re asking for a date of divorce, they’re asking for the name of the ex-husband, they’re asking for the marriage date,” said Blanchard. “When someone passes at 90, the family doesn’t always have that information and if the person was not divorced here in Quebec, that’s a whole other issue.”

Funeral homes are discouraged from contacting the registry about the status of a file until 60 days have passed, said Blanchard. Only then do families find out there may be missing information or a typo, which can add to the wait time.

“It’s frustrating for everybody,” said Blanchard.

Better monitoring of wait times needed?

In 2018, Jeremy Hockenstein received his mother’s death certificate 10 days after her death.

He figured it would be issued just as quickly for his father, who died in Montreal at the beginning of February 2024. He was surprised when both the notary and funeral home told him it could take up to eight or nine weeks.

“My dad is such a simple case,” said Hockenstein. “He’d been married to one person for almost 50 years. He was born in Montreal.”

Hockenstein’s father, Michael, had put aside money in a life insurance policy for his three sons.

“They won’t let us claim that until we have the death certificate,” said Hockenstein, who lives in New York City.

Hockenstein said he and his two brothers are luckily not in a cash crunch. Their dad was also living in a long-term care home before his death, so there are no mortgage payments to keep up.

But it has definitely delayed their grieving process.

“It just feels emotionally more difficult to be waiting three to four months to kind of take the next steps,” said Hockenstein.

He understands wait times vary occasionally, but he thinks the province should have some sort of internal monitoring mechanism so that when delays exceed a certain threshold, more staff can be allocated.

“Things can happen, but there should be the ability to learn and improve and react when it starts going off track,” said Hockenstein.

Steep rise in deaths

Quebec says the delays are due to an increase in the number of deaths, a result of the province’s aging population.

According to Jonathan Gaudreault, a spokesperson for the Employment Ministry, 2022-2023 represented a “record year” for the number of death declarations the civil status registry received.

In the past year, the registry got 79,170 death declarations, an increase of 8.2 per cent compared to 2021-2022, said Gaudreault in an email.

There were also more birth, marriage and civil union registrations in the past year compared to 2021-2022.

“These increases have resulted in longer processing times and variations in the number of files processed,” said Gaudreault.

The minister that oversees the civil status registrar says she is working to bring wait times for death certificates back down.

“We’re working to increase efficiencies by various means, but we also have extra staff coming in to lend a hand to improve turnaround times. That’s important to me, and we’re going to do it,” said Employment Minister Kateri Champagne Jourdain.

The civil status registrar received extra resources in December 2023 and is asking employees to work overtime.

Gaudreault said the registrar hopes to bring waiting times down to 20 working days for applications that are filled out correctly.

There is a checklist people can follow on the registry’s web site to make sure they include all the necessary information when they send in their application.

Cenne finds it hard to believe that Quebec is dealing with more deaths than any other province.

She decided to speak out about her experience in the hopes it would help others and spur the province to speed things up.

Without her husband’s death certificate, Cenne said she feels stuck.

She doesn’t want to forget him or the gap his loss has left in her life, but until she can wrap up his affairs, she can’t move forward.

“I have to learn how to be a different person, an alone person,” said Cenne.