Kathryn Van Ameyde put a lot of thought into her father’s obituary.
“You’re trying to sum up someone’s entire life in like, 200, 250 words, in… an emotional time, and it’s hard,” she said.
A physician who died in October 2025, Ken Van Ameyde was “exceptionally committed to his work,” and “an exacting but fair teacher.”
Kathryn worked to include anecdotes with a touch of humour, remembering his haphazard DIY projects, and his choice words for Winnipeg drivers.
But shortly after the obituary went up on Wojcik’s Funeral Home’s website, Van Ameyde’s aunt reached out.
“My aunt, who had proofread the obituary for me, said, ‘This isn’t what you wrote,’” Van Ameyde said.
Her aunt had not seen the obituary she’d written, but another posting for Ken on echovita.com. Van Ameyde says the posting contained errors and omitted the anecdotes she’d carefully prepared.
“It was a) factually incorrect, but b) they stripped it of all… the personality of it,” she said, adding the posting made her “livid.”
Van Ameyde reached out to Echovita, demanding they remove the post, to which the company obliged.
“I also reached out to their web hosts and to Google as well, trying to get it delisted from the search results,” she said.
Echovita is an “archive of obituaries and public death notices,” according to the website. It gathers information from public obituaries on funeral home websites, posting information like family members and date of death.
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The company says their mission is “to help families share for free the news of a loved one’s passing and preserve their memory, without financial or technological barriers,” and that it follows all applicable laws regarding public records, copyright, and privacy.
Each posting on Echovita.com includes purchase options, including lighting a virtual candle, planting trees, or sending flowers in name of the deceased. While family members are not notified when a posting is created, they can be notified if someone makes a purchase in their loved one’s name. The company also has a solidarity program, where family members can contact them and claim a portion of the sales.
Wojcik’s Funeral Home says it has received numerous calls from families who have found their loved one’s Echovita posting, thinking Wojcik’s has posted an inaccurate and incomplete obituary.
“They all initially think the same thing,” said Wojcik’s office administrator Laval Palendat. “Like, ‘My sister just found this obituary on this site and the information is incorrect.’”
After explaining to families about the third-party site, the funeral home lets them know how to request the post be removed or corrected.
“I have sort of a little template to send them of what to do,” Palendat said, “…it’s something I do now. It’s just a process because of how many calls we get.”
She doesn’t agree with how the site operates.
“If they’re out to just help people spread the word of somebody’s loved one who has passed, that’s different. But this is like a business to me, it seems,” she said.
Yuri Chumak is a Toronto-based intellectual property lawyer with Dickinson Wright LLP. He says sites like Echovita aren’t breaking the law by reposting information like names of the deceased’s family members and date of death.
“The fact of death in Canada, that’s public information. That’s not copyrightable. But the obituary text is not public, and is copyrighted,” he said.
Chumak says it would be up to a consumer to bring forward a case against them to make a change in that regard. In his opinion, it’s the sales element that is more likely to put a company like Echovita at risk.
“Where there is a bit of a legal risk is leaving it ambiguous or saying just enough to allow the visitor or the reader to reach a conclusion that the family is benefiting, or may benefit, and then preying upon the gap in information to essentially take from the visitor,” he said.
Van Ameyde believes the purchase options are misleading, as families are not notified of their loved one’s Echovita posting when it goes up.
“We had quickly warned people that this was not legitimate obituary, and to instead go through the Wojcik’s Funeral Home one,” she said.
She contacted her MLA and MP, and through her MP Doug Eyolfsen, petitioned the House of Commons to ban the modification of obituaries, and ban sales not explicitly mentioned in the original obituary.
“It’s… a morally bankrupt practice, what they’re doing right now,” she said.
The petition is collecting signatures until Feb. 26.
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