Nova Scotia’s first two individual ‘death reviews’ slammed for lack of transparency

HALIFAX – 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. Both were released Friday, marking the first time any of the province’s death review committees have examined individual deaths.

Neither of the documents from the two 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.

But some say the lack of detail makes it almost impossible to determine what went wrong and why the non-binding recommendations should be implemented.

Detailed reports were handed to the province’s justice minister earlier this year, but those will not be released to the public.

The province’s chief medical examiner, Dr. Matthew Bowes, said all personal and identifying information had to be removed by law to ensure the families involved were not re-traumatized.

“I know from talking to hundreds of families that some of them really do want their story told, but many do not,” Bowes said in an interview Friday. “And we don’t want to re-traumatize families by bringing them into a spotlight that they didn’t welcome.” 

But the executive director of the Nova Scotia College of Social Workers, Alec Stratford, said the recommendations are so vague that they call into question the transparency of Nova Scotia’s relatively new death review process.

“The reports released today provide no detail in terms of accountability,” he said in an interview Friday. “(They) make recommendations that may or may not result in meaningful change.”

Stratford, whose organization regularly deals with people in the province’s care, says that unlike the death review process, the criminal justice system has found ways 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. “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 …. We deal with confidential matters in justice system and health system all the time in terms of being able to report.”

Stratford said the vague nature of the process is not surprising because the provincial government was warned about that shortcoming when the Fatality Investigations Act was introduced in 2019. To make matters worse, the government is free to ignore the non-binding recommendations, he said.

As for the recommendations released Friday, those from the child death review committee call for improving safety and supervision at public pools, “while also recognizing that imposing strict requirements for lifeguards and adult/child ratios may also not be feasible.”

The committee is recommending Nova Scotia should also adopt a regulations governing public pools, similar to those in other provinces. That could include requiring lifeguards to supervise pools during peak usage.

When Bowes was asked if there was a lifeguard on duty when the child died at the public pool, he said that level of detail was off limits.

“Nova Scotia is a very small place,” he said. “Details like that may help people to actually discover the identity of this person.”

Bowes insisted the death review process is a step forward.

“There’s a lot of jurisdictions where this kind of analysis just doesn’t happen at all,” he said. “So the lack of detail is, for me at least, less important than that the process exists at all.”

Meanwhile, the committee that examined the death in custody issued a long list of recommendations, most of them having to do with better management of health records and medical assessments, retaining written and electronic evidence and considering the use of body cameras for correctional officers.

Another recommendation calls for all correctional facilities to have a permanent or on-call medical staff person with addictions expertise.

“The committee makes note of the fact that all recommendations are underpinned by the assumption that the system that delivers them is adequately … staffed,” the report says. “We heard … that this assumption is not true much of the time, and that critical areas of our justice system are frequently precariously staffed.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 14, 2025.