It’s taken a long time for Toronto officials to recognize a crisis: the city is running out of land to bury its dead. For The Local, Inori Roy reports on the monopolization and “McDonald’s-ization” of Ontario’s bereavement industry, and looks into one group in particular, Mount Pleasant, that has amassed $1.2 billion in assets and hundreds of millions in revenue from its cemetery and funeral services. In the past, cemeteries and family-owned funeral homes worked together in a friendly, cooperative way, but the corporatization of death care has since transformed the industry into a for-profit machine focused on money and real estate.
Back then, Hunter says, cemeteries and funeral homes were “completely different animals.” Funeral homes were responsible for collecting and preparing the deceased, hosting services, ordering flowers, and everything up to the moment the casket reached its final resting place—the rest, burial onward, was the responsibility of the cemetery. During working hours, Humphrey and Mount Pleasant Cemetery were often two limbs of a single organism, working together to lay a body to rest. After clocking off, workers would mingle. “We played hockey together, we played baseball together, we curled together, we would get together and do pub nights,” Hunter remembers. They had, he says, “a very close, intimate professional relationship.”
The governments of aging populations in dense urban centres across the world are already having to face this problem. Hong Kong has been actively encouraging its residents to be cremated; Singapore has a fifteen-year limit on burial plots, after which time the remains are disinterred and cremated. In Toronto, Hanson says, there are options. We could backfill cemeteries—interring people in the spaces between existing graves. We could introduce community burial grounds, smaller cemeteries built into local parks and parkettes. And, as much as the idea might be discomfiting to some, we could bury people in the Greenbelt—which would, in theory, only add to the need to protect and preserve it.
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