Nova Scotia’s chief medical examiner has released recommendations from committees that reviewed the deaths of two people in the province’s care, but the documents are being criticized for failing to disclose what actually happened.
One list of recommendations deals with the death of a child at a public pool, and the other is in response to the death of a person in custody.
Neither of the reports from the death review committees contain any details about the victims or what circumstances led to their deaths, which is strictly in line with legislation aimed at protecting the victims’ privacy.
Get daily National news
Get the day’s top news, political, economic, and current affairs headlines, delivered to your inbox once a day.
The lack of detail, however, makes it almost impossible to determine what went wrong and why the non-binding recommendations should be implemented.
The province’s chief medical examiner, Dr. Matthew Bowes, says all personal and identifying information had to be removed by law to ensure the families involved were not re-traumatized.
But the head of the Nova Scotia College of Social Workers says the recommendations are so vague that they call into question the transparency and accountability of Nova Scotia’s relatively new death review process.
Alec Stratford says that unlike the death review process, the criminal justice system has found a way to protect the privacy of young people in conflict with the law while allowing public access to details of what happened.
“Yes, we need a trauma-informed system,” Stratford said in an interview. “But I think there are lots of ways that we can tell a story and show the evidence that doesn’t jeopardize a (person’s) confidentiality.”
© 2025 The Canadian Press
