Families unable to bury their loved ones have started a class-action suit against a Montreal cemetery, where a labour dispute has simmered for almost two months.
Notre-Dame-des-Neiges cemetery is now using a refrigerated trailer to hold bodies, and has been forced to stack coffins to maximize available space.
The cemetery receives roughly 50 bodies each week.
Debra de Thomassis is waiting to bury her grandmother, and her family is spearheading the class-action suit.
"She's being treated like meat. She's not being treated like a person who lived on the Earth for 90 years," de Thomassis told CTV Montreal.
"She's not being respected, her memory's not being respected, and her body is not being respected."
She said her grandparents signed a contract with the cemetery in 1986 and fully paid for their funerals, at a cost of $10,000.
The suit demands the cemetery pay half the costs specified in any funeral contracts, and $200 in damages for each day bodies have remained in storage.
About 130 cemetery employees have been locked-out since May 16. The two sides of the labour dispute haven't met since May 8.
Paul Caghassi, who is waiting to bury his mother, hopes the class-action suit will kick-start negotiations.
"We've been talking about it but nobody's doing anything about it. Today, they have to know we're serious," he said.
"Our objective is to bury our dead."
Meanwhile, the union has appealed to Montreal's Archbishop Jean-Claude Cardinal Turcotte, hoping he will help move negotiations along.
But Turcotte said that while he is concerned about the effects of the strike, it's a labour problem.
"I'm not a specialist on that," he said earlier this week.
With a report by CTV Montreal's Annie DeMelt and files from The Canadian Press
