This Manitoba woman is calling for a ban on third-party obituary websites. Here’s why

A Manitoba woman is calling on the government to act after a third-party website posts an obituary for her father.

Kathryn Van Ameyde’s father Ken died last October. One of the hardest tasks for her was writing his obituary.

“I wrote the obituary myself,” she said. “I had my aunt proofread it for me and it went live on Oct. 10 on the funeral home’s website.”

But within a few hours, she said her aunt went online and found another article on a different website – but it wasn’t the same obituary Van Ameyde wrote.

“It had stripped the personality of it, all the character that you would try to put into an obituary to summarize someone’s life,” she said. “It’s difficult to do so, already. It was also factually incorrect.”

“They had misassigned his partner to be my partner, his partner’s kids to be his grandkids, so factual errors in addition to just being rewritten to being meaningless as an obituary,” she said.

The site her father’s obituary was posted on is called Echovita, a Quebec-based company.

Van Ameyde reached out to Echovita, demanding they remove the post, which they did a short time later.

“It sucked, I don’t know how else to describe it. It was already a difficult time, made much more difficult by this,” Van Ameyde said.

CTV News reached out to Echovita, and a spokesperson said in a statement: “We are a Canadian organization that centralizes, aggregates, and amplifies publicly available obituaries to inform the general public of a passing. Our mission is to make public information more easily accessible, free of charge.”

“When a family contacts us about an obituary that contains incorrect information or that they prefer to have removed, we act immediately,” the statement read, adding that the company can legally share “the basic facts of publicly available obituaries, because that information is public.”

Each post on the site also includes purchase options that include planting a memorial tree, lighting a virtual candle, or sending flowers in the name of the family’s loved one.

The company says families can claim a portion of money from virtual candles and that it also keeps “a portion, which goes towards our operational costs.”

Jeff Hagel with the Funeral Service Association of Canada (FSAC) says companies, like Echovita, walk a fine line.

“Third-party websites know just enough about the copyright law where they can produce news,” he said. “They walk that fine line by not infringing copyright by duplicating the exact words that were written.”

In 2025, the FSAC issued a warning about some third-party sites, which they say practice “obituary piracy.”

“We haven’t been able to combat it or shut it down, and the best advice we give to funeral homes and families, is to post an obituary as soon as possible,” Hagel said.

“Even if that means posting something that a death has occurred, and the family is taking time to write the official obituary,” he added. “It just helps push the scrapers and pirates down to the second page of Google, where they are less relevant.”

Hagel says the FSAC would love to see different levels of government or social media companies step in.

“It’s all under ill-intent and it’s misleading the public and misleading news,” they added.

Similar concerns have surfaced before. In 2019, a company called “Afterlife” was ordered to pay $20 million in a class-action lawsuit for being in breach of copyright laws.

One funeral home based in Winnipeg says if you’re making donations, make sure you know where your money is going.

“There’s so many people out there, that I don’t want to say are naive, but (they) haven’t experienced this before, so they are innocent, and then they are taken,” said Laval Palendat, the office administrator at Wojcik’s Funeral Home. “I think it’s a shame.”

She says she’s received calls from dozens of families who have seen their obituaries on websites outside of the funeral home.

“They are just punching in their loved one’s name and this Echovita is coming up,” she said. “At first, I was like, ‘we have nothing to do with it.’”

“I was helping the families by getting it taken off and complaining about it,” she added.

Palendat says the funeral home lets the families know how to request the post to be removed or corrected.

“We give them a link where they can remove it, complain, or change,” she said.

Van Ameyde contacted her local MLA and MP and petitioned the House of Commons to address what she sees as a major issue.

The petition calls for a ban on modifying original obituaries and a ban on any form of sales, donations or financial transactions that are not in the original obituary.

Van Ameyde says the petition has more than 500 signatures and will proceed through the petition process.

She says she hopes her story can make others aware of sites reposting obituaries.

“I understand that death and the facts of death are public knowledge, people have every right to post them, but changing obituary stuff, that’s not to me an ethical practice in any way, shape or form, so I’m hoping this stops,” she said.