Grieving families still waiting to bury loved ones after cemetery strike

The cemetery was largely closed to the public for months in 2023 due to a workers' strike. At one point, more than 300 bodies being kept in storage awaiting burial.

For more than a year, an urn holding the ashes of Bridget Heffernan’s brother has remained in her Montreal-area home instead of being buried in the plot at Notre-Dame-des-Neiges cemetery where her family members have been laid to rest for nearly a century.

With her mother’s death last September, Heffernan now has two sets of remains to bury instead of one.

But months after the end of a lengthy strike that brought operations at one of Canada’s largest cemeteries to a halt, Heffernan says she still can’t get an answer on when the burials can take place, despite repeated efforts to reach management.

While she doesn’t mind having the urns at her home, she’s looking forward to the moment when her mother and brother can be buried in the family plot, with a few family members present and a priest on hand to say a prayer.

“Technically, they’re supposed to be in the ground, back to the earth,” she said.

The cemetery was largely closed to the public from mid-January to mid-September last year due to a strike by some of its workers that, at one point, resulted in more than 300 bodies being kept in storage awaiting burial. The cemetery reached a deal with maintenance workers in July and with office workers in December.

Cemetery management did not respond to requests for comment, but it said in a news release at the time of reopening in September that it hoped to resolve the backlog of burials by the end of 2023.

Denis Martin, a resident of Oka, west of Montreal, said his mother, Eileen Ashford, died last April in Vancouver just shy of her 100th birthday. For months, he has been trying to arrange to have her ashes buried in the family plot at Notre-Dame-des-Neiges in the presence of her large family, which included seven children.