Manitoba’s proposed service fee on funerals amounts to ‘death tax’, critics say

Some of Manitoba's funeral directors are apparently up in arms over a proposed service fee they say would amount to a "death tax" on their clients.

The fee, ranging from $10 to $40 per funeral, would be used to pay for inspections and audits of funeral-services companies by the watchdog Funeral Board of Manitoba, along with investigations of any potential wrongdoing.

"The province doesn't have the appetite to call it a death tax," Owen McKenzie, president of the Manitoba Funeral Services Association, told the Winnipeg Free Press.

"We pay a lump sum for our licence as a funeral home and in addition, we'll likely end up paying a licence fee per death. It will be a small amount -- it could be considered an assessment -- that will be paid by us and, in turn, we'll transfer it to the family we're serving."

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Word that the fee would be passed on to customers appeared to have the government backtracking, CBC News said. Officials said no fee would be levied that could end up coming out of a family's wallet.

Kevin Sweryd, director of Winnipeg's Bardal Funeral Home, told CTV News the proposed fee amounts to a tax on families who have no choice to opt out since it will be passed on by the service provider.

"We never want to have to charge any more than we have to,” he said.

If that's true today, it wasn't always so. Funeral homes were once notorious for using guilt to push up the price of their services.

The funeral business has been looked at with a jaundiced eye ever since Jessica Mitford's 1963 book, The American Way of Death exposed the way funeral directors took advantage of grieving families to up-sell them on increasingly costly arrangements.

The industry's been lampooned in movies like The Loved One and its inherent creepiness was exploited to the fullest in Six Feet Under.

A PBS documentary said funerals were a $20-billion annual industry, with the average cost ranging from $8,000 to $10,000. It's big business, with large corporations owning an increasing percentage of funeral homes and cemeteries in the U.S. and Canada.

Statistics Canada data from 2009 show the industry's operating revenue was more than $1.5 billion, trending upward from previous years, with an operating profit margin of just under 14 per cent.

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CTV News said the average cost of a traditional burial in Manitoba was from $7,000 to $10,000, with increasingly popular cremations costing $3,000-$4,500.

Other provinces levy fees to help cover the cost of regulation, McKenzie said.

The Funeral Board of Manitoba is set to take over administration of the Prearranged Funeral Services Act and needs revenue from the proposed fee to cover the costs of its work.

Oversight is clearly necessary. Sweryd told the Free Press several funeral homes have been caught overcharging customers, switching out expensive caskets for cheaper ones and being disrespectful to grieving families.

But he said the fee amounts to a tax on all customers.

"If you're a funeral home that plays by the rules and would never have to be investigated, your families will have to pay," said Sweryd. "The good apples would be paying for the bad apples."