The Alberta Funeral Service Association exists to advance the profession of funeral service in Alberta. We are committed to providing high quality services to our members and representing their interests through constructive dialogue and lobbying with government.
The Alberta Funeral Service Association exists to advance the profession of funeral service in Alberta. We are committed to providing high quality services to our members and representing their interests through constructive dialogue and lobbying with government.
First framed by our founders in 1928 and carried forward in every generation since, the AFSA Statement of Purpose remains:
As Funeral Directors, we acknowledge our responsibilities to the citizens of this Province especially those we serve and our mutual responsibilities to the funeral service profession.
To the public, we pledge strict adherence to provincial health laws, pre-need service regulations, and all laws pertaining to our business or profession, a high moral and service standard to all, regardless of race, color or creed.
To those we serve, we pledge confidential business and professional relationships, to conduct all services in a dignified and respectful manner, to provide all merchandise at fair prices, to care for, and to show respect for the loved ones, entrusted to our care.
To our profession, we pledge support of higher educational standards and licensing to fair business practices, and honourable relationships with one another.
For close to one hundred years, the Alberta Funeral Service Association has carried a single conviction across generations: that the families of this province deserve funeral service of the highest standard, delivered with skill, dignity, and unwavering integrity. From its first meeting in a Red Deer hall in 1928 to the milestone of its centennial in 2028, AFSA has remained, in every era, an association of professionals committed to one another, to their communities, and to the people they serve in their most difficult hours.
Before there was an association, there was a single storefront. In 1886, James “Cappy” Smart opened Jas. Smart and Co., Undertakers and Embalmers, on Stephen Avenue in Calgary — the first formal funeral parlour in the territory that would become Alberta. Smart would go on to become Calgary’s beloved fire chief, but to those in funeral service he is remembered as the profession’s first practitioner in the province.
Organized funeral service in Alberta began in the town of Strathcona — now part of south Edmonton — where the Alberta Funeral Directors’ and Embalmers’ Association was incorporated on July 10, 1907. First to sign the memorandum of incorporation was Dr. John Clarke Wainwright, a veterinarian and funeral director, alongside Wm. J. Oston, Sam Wainwright, and G.M. Oston. That first association would in time lapse as its founders moved and scattered — but the seed had been planted, and the same Dr. Wainwright would help bring it back to life two decades later.
On a Wednesday afternoon in the Oddfellows’ Hall at Red Deer, sixty-two funeral directors from across the province gathered to organize what would become the Alberta Funeral Service Association. The conditions of the day demanded it: more than one hundred and seventy-five firms and individuals were then operating in the undertaking business in Alberta — some of them blacksmiths, livery stable keepers, hardware merchants, even grocers — many with no qualifications at all, and little legislation existed to curb unethical practice.
The men who gathered that day bent all their energies toward building a membership that would be a credit to the profession. George E. Bowker of Ponoka was elected the association’s first president, with A.W. Kelly of High River as vice-president and Dr. J.C. Wainwright — the same man who had signed the 1907 incorporation — as Secretary-Treasurer, beginning a tenure that would span more than a quarter century.
For so young an organization, an ambitious program: while most funeral associations across the continent were content with one-day meetings, Alberta’s resolved to hold a full three-day convention in Memorial Hall, Edmonton. Seventy-five members attended. His Worship Mayor Bury welcomed the profession to the city; Wm. B. McCarthy of The Champion Company, Springfield, Ohio, served as lecturer and demonstrator; embalming examinations were held and diplomas granted. The first convention was a success — as every convention since has proved to be.
At the second annual convention, the membership adopted a Code of Ethics whose opening words have echoed in every generation of AFSA membership since:
“Believing in the universal application of the Golden Rule and in the value of proper organization and cooperation, as well as in the free interchange of ideas and experiences among its members, the Alberta Funeral Directors’ and Embalmers’ Association adopts the following Code of Ethics: We agree personally to maintain the highest standards of ethical, moral and business practices, in the conduct of our business, so as to give the public the best service, and therefore reflect credit on ourselves, our association and our profession.”
— Original Code of Ethics, adopted July 24, 1929
“Our chief concern as funeral directors is our service to the living,” the Code declared — a principle that still anchors the AFSA Code of Ethics today.
Three years after the Red Deer meeting, the Alberta Funeral Directors’ and Embalmers’ Association was formally incorporated under provincial law — the association that would later take its present name, the Alberta Funeral Service Association. George E. Bowker served as its first president under incorporation.
Amid loose public talk about “the high cost of dying,” the provincial government appointed a commission under the Hon. Alex Ross to investigate the funeral directing business in Alberta. Accountants visited every funeral home in the province; public hearings were held in Calgary, Lethbridge, Edmonton, Medicine Hat, Drumheller and Stettler. The association cooperated completely — and when Commissioner Ross tabled his report in the legislature in March 1932, it showed that funeral costs in Alberta were no higher than in other provinces, that low-priced funerals often returned little or no profit, and, in the words of the press of the day, that “the report gives the funeral directors a clean bill of health.”
The association’s early advocacy bore fruit when Dr. Malcolm R. Bow, Deputy Minister of Health, announced that from January 1, 1933, only licensed embalmers would be permitted to practice in the province — the direct result of years of work between the association and the Department of Health. It was the first great legislative victory of the young association, and the foundation of the professional standards Albertans rely on to this day.
The most ambitious undertaking of the association’s first quarter-century: the first annual School of Embalming, a two-week course for the embalmers of the province, held at Edmonton under the leadership of Professor Jolley. The embarkation was fully justified by the response — the average roll call was fifty-six students, and on one occasion no fewer than ninety-three were present. The educational program it began would come to be described as the best provided by any funeral directors’ association in North America.
By its twenty-first anniversary there were fifty-two licensed funeral homes in Alberta, all fully qualified — and of the sixty-two veterans who had taken part in the 1928 organizational meeting, four were still carrying on their profession: J.K. Brennen of Stettler, J.W. Connelly of Edmonton, A.E. Fee of Killam, and G. Harry Martin of Lethbridge. The Director marked the milestone with a souvenir issue:
“That this story is one of progress cannot be denied, nor can it be wondered at, since the entire membership from the start, has been devoted to public service.”
— The Director, July 1949
Dr. John Clarke Wainwright — first signatory of the 1907 incorporation, Secretary-Treasurer from 1928, and editor of The Director through all its years of publication — died in Calgary on April 16, 1954. The Director ceased publication with his passing. Of all the men and women who have given of their time and talents to the association, none stands out more.
The association marked its fiftieth anniversary — half a century of service to the families of Alberta since the meeting at the Oddfellows’ Hall.
The sixty-fifth anniversary was celebrated at the annual meeting in Red Deer — the association’s birthplace — in September 1993, where long-term service plaques honoured careers of twenty-five to sixty years. That same year the association published A History of Funeral Service in Alberta by Harald Gunderson, the book from which this timeline is drawn, and welcomed the newly approved government Regulatory Board along with a distance-education program that was a first for funeral service in Canada.
When the founders met in Red Deer in 1928, they could not have known that a century later their association would still be answering the call. Yet here we stand, on the threshold of our centennial, with the same conviction that brought sixty-two funeral directors together on a Wednesday afternoon: that the people of Alberta deserve, at the most difficult moment of their lives, the steady hand of a profession that has set itself a higher standard. The names change. The standard does not.
