Montreal archbishop urges end to cemetery lockout

The archbishop of Montreal called for an end Monday to the lockout of maintenance workers at Notre-Dame-des-Neiges cemetery, where families have not been able to bury their deceased relatives since the middle of May.

Cardinal Jean-Claude Turcotte had been unwilling to intervene in the dispute until Monday morning when he met with the families of some of the hundreds awaiting burial and said they have suffered enough.

He urged the cemetery management and the workers' union to get back to the negotiation table and resolve the dispute.

Turcotte said he doesn't have the political or the legal authority to force an end to the lockout.

But, he said, he does have the moral authority to convince the two sides to restart negotiations.

On May 16, management locked out 130 workers who were in a legal strike position.

The families waiting to bury their relatives have since launched a $6-million class action lawsuit against the cemetery, saying more and more of the deceased are being locked in refrigeration tanks and the gravesites are being left untended.

Paul Chagassi, whose mother died May 13, is one of the participants in the lawsuit.

"We waited two, three days. We thought it's going be a question of weeks. Now we are almost two months into this conflict and we still didn't bury my mother, and 200 other families are in the same position I am in," he said during an interview last month.

Chagassi said the cemetery crossed the line of treating the deceased with dignity when it began storing bodies in refrigerators.

"It is a refrigerator where they store meat," he said. "This is unacceptable. We cannot accept to see our loved ones treated that way, plus our families."

The cemetery, one of the largest in Canada, is the final resting place for late hockey legend Maurice Richard as well as for former Quebec premier Robert Bourassa. In some areas, the uncut grass has reached higher than the gravestones while the labour dispute drags on.