Weighill ready to make changes to Coroner’s office

Saskatchewan’s newest chief coroner is getting ready to implement recommendations that he came up with before taking over the role.

Clive Weighill led a review of the coroner’s office and brought forward 44 recommendations for improvements.

Weighill had spent years as Regina’s deputy police chief and in Saskatoon as the police chief. In August, Weighill was given the role as chief coroner.

His new role will make him responsible for ensuring Saskatchewan’s system is on-par with other provinces and to provide leadership.

He joined Gormley to talk about how he plans on bringing in the recommendations he had made.

“We’re just prioritizing those now and putting them forward to the minister to see what we can move forward with immediately,” Weighill said.

He added about half of the recommendations will need to be considered in the upcoming budget, but the other half don’t require financial components.

“Those should be some of the ones that we should hit on without costing the province any money.”

Some of those include changing things in the coroner’s act and how internal meetings are run. Weighill said most of the changes are meant to give the office more capacity to do things like fulfill the mandate for the mass casualty plan and continue to train community coroners.

He said there are about 85 community coroners in the province.

Weighill noted there has been a lot of effort put into the coroner’s system, but with tight budgets recent year, the office has been lagging behind.