B.C.’s chief coroner envisions course to prepare people beyond TV ‘preconceptions’

British Columbia’s chief coroner says the work of the coroners service is not like the portrayal in crime-scene television shows, and those who take on the job might find it’s not for them.

Dr. Jatinder Baidwan said in an interview on Monday that there are “preconceptions” about the work coroners do, and portrayals on TV are far from reality.

It’s not glamorous work, he said.

“It’s incredibly worthy work, but it’s not for everyone,” he said. “Some people join and within three months realize actually, once they’ve done a number of shifts, they realize actually it wasn’t for them and that’s OK.”

Baidwan’s remarks come after it was recently revealed that the province has increased pay rates for community coroners by more than 50 per cent, to $49.77 an hour, as it seeks to fill vacancies covering dozens of communities across the province.

Current and former coroners told The Canadian Press last year that the former hourly wage of about $32 for community coroners was driving people away, with the job requiring them to be on-call 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

The time between calls is unpaid, and community coroners, also known as field coroners, continue to be excluded from union membership.

British Columbia has 50 full-time coroners, and around 80 community coroners that work on-call and “as needed,” that come from investigative, legal or medical backgrounds. Though they don’t perform autopsies, they assess scenes of death that are unnatural, sudden, unexpected, unexplained or unattended.

Baidwan said many coroners that get hired full-time are pulled from the roster of community coroners, and the service does a round of hiring each year.

“I’m trying to work through how do we improve our ability to show people what it’s like early on, and even before they get recruited,” he said.

He envisions a post-secondary course to give “people an insight into the job before they take it on.”

Baidwan says no such course exists in Canada, and the service is looking to improve on other issues now that the B.C. government has increased wages for field coroners for the first time since 2016.

Field coroners in B.C. are recruited from many walks of life with investigative backgrounds, and the boost to their wages went into effect last month.

Baidwan said the service is looking to recruit more field coroners for the on-call positions, with the workload varying widely between rural and urban areas.

He said there’s no “widespread discontent” among community coroners, although the lack of on-call pay and other issues remain a concern and “everyone agrees that these things need to be fixed.”

Former field coroner Sonya Schulz said in an email that her time with the service “encompassed the toxic drug crisis, COVID, and the catastrophic heat dome.”

She saw victims of “horrific attacks,” sexual violence and gruesome car accidents, Schulz said.

“During that time, I’ve seen things that have changed me forever,” she said. “One thing I’ve learned is that very few people outside this work truly understand what we see, what we carry home with us, or what we’re expected to manage every day.”

She said she was glad that the government passed a wage increase for field coroners, but “they continue to fall short in what they offer these important workers.”

“No sick time, no benefits, no on-call pay. No right to organize into a labour union,” she said. “Yet every day coroners across the province lace up their boots, get into their own cars, and head out into the worst day of someone’s life.”

Schulz, a nurse, said in an interview on Monday that the wage increase felt like a “soft win,” but the exclusion from union membership and lack of paid hours when required to be on-call remains an issue.

“There’s a shelf life for the work, right? Because the income is variable and limited,” she said. “No benefits, no on-call pay, that’s been ongoing as a subject of discontent among coroners for a long time.”

The wage increase seems like a “placating move” that doesn’t address the inequities between field coroners and other responders, such as paramedics and firefighters,” Schulz said.

Baidwan said getting the wage increase passed after working toward it for several years was important because “in the last 10 years, the cost of living has changed quite considerably.”

He said dealing with other issues at the coroners service is like “painting the Golden Gate Bridge.”

“You start at one end and you work your way to the end, and then you work back again,” he said.

Being a coroner, he said, is “an incredibly hard job.”

“It’s one of those jobs where you can only imagine what it’s like if you actually do it. It’s really difficult to understand what it is without doing it.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published July 6, 2026.