The Office of the Chief Coroner in Ontario has been conducting formal death investigations to ensure no child’s passing is ignored or concealed. To date, investigators have confirmed 271 additional deaths across the province that were not previously documented. This work is handled as a formal investigation and not academic research. Using school ledgers, church records, and cemetery files to reconstruct each child’s history with accuracy.
Some updates include:
Conducting these as formal death investigations rather than academic research allows for a major case management approach to be applied to each child. This process helps correct the historical record, which is often riddled with incomplete data or inaccuracies, including cases where children were wrongly listed as deceased.
In Ontario residential schools, the most common cause of death was Tuberculosis, followed by drowning, along with cases where death records were incorrect, incomplete, or misleading. Investigations have also found that some children were transferred between residential schools, hospitals, and other institutions, which made it harder to track what happened to them and where they were buried. In some cases, burial locations were recorded incorrectly, or deaths were listed that may not have occurred as reported.
Ontario has begun formal investigations into these deaths, but most other provinces are not conducting similar reviews. In Manitoba, many records do not exist because child deaths were not required to be reported before the 1970s, and some records were later destroyed. Other provinces say investigations should be led by Indigenous communities rather than governments. Investigators say the work is important because it helps provide long-overdue answers to families about children who never returned home.
