The Coroner’s Office, which unveiled a new digital platform on Wednesday, intends to better monitor and document the deaths of homeless people. The latter still too often go under the radar despite the social crisis plaguing Montreal.
Posted at 6:39 p.m.
“We will be able to better monitor this, and therefore have better traceability of homeless people whose deaths are studied by the Coroner’s Office. […] This is an important file for us,” explained Wednesday the chief coroner, Mr.e Reno Bernier, arrived at his post in July 2023.
Last October, The Press reported that the Coroner’s Office had recorded 72 deaths of homeless people in Quebec in 2023, compared to only around twenty per year from 2019 to 2021. Over the last five years, there have been 180 deaths in total, including partial data of 2024.
Read the file “Three times more deaths of homeless people in Quebec”
This portrait is potentially very incomplete, since the death of a homeless person does not systematically give rise to a coroner’s report and the reports do not always mention that the person was homeless.
The proof: of the 35 people who died last year reported by Résilience, which manages a day center frequented by indigenous and Inuit homeless people, only one was the subject of a coroner’s report.
“Ready to collaborate”
To correct the situation, Me Bernier reaches out to the community network. “We are going to have more agility, so it is certain that we will be ready to collaborate with any organization that wants to intervene in terms of homelessness status,” he said.
“What you need to understand is that if the death is natural, it will not necessarily be reported to the Coroner’s Office. If a homeless person dies of natural causes, we will not necessarily know, so the organizations must inform us,” emphasized the manager on this subject.
-That said, when the status of the homeless person has a link with the causes or circumstances of the death, the coroner “must indicate it in his report,” says Reno Bernier, who strives to raise awareness among the members of his organization about this regard. “I even gave a reminder on this subject recently,” he said.
The digital transformation of the Coroner’s Office will mainly involve a new “dashboard”, recently available online. The tool, accessible to all, currently includes all of the coroners’ decisions since April 2024, but will soon be updated.
You can sort the recommendations by dates of death, dates of coroner’s reports, objectives of the reports, file numbers or even organizations involved.
Of the 370 recommendations published to date, 100% of them have been responded to, and in 79% of cases, the recommendation has been implemented in full. Otherwise, so-called “alternative” measures were taken 16% of the time and the recommendation was not applied in 4% of cases.
This is a “marked improvement” compared to July 2023, when the response rate to coroners’ reports was just 42%. At the beginning of 2024, The Press reported that the Ministry of Health and Social Services (MSSS) as well as many public organizations were failing to respond to the coroner’s recommendations within the prescribed deadlines.
No more virtual autopsies
The Coroner’s Office also wants to increase the number of “virtual autopsies”, performed using computed tomography (CT) machines. “It is an image of the deceased which allows us to see if there is any trauma suffered. In certain situations, this will avoid a traditional autopsy which can take several months. […] It also avoids body movements. It’s a niche that we want to continue to develop in the future,” underlined M.e Bernier. Currently, the Coroner’s Office is doing just under 600 virtual autopsies per year, a number that is trending upwards of about 15% over the past year and a half as TNM devices are now available in the most regions across Quebec.
With Isabelle Ducas, The Press