Municipalties across Canada review rules governing tributes to lost loved ones

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WINNIPEG - For those grieving the death of a loved one, usually in a traffic accident, a roadside memorial is more than a collection of teddy bears and candles.

It's sacred ground.

But for many others, the make-shift shrines are eyesores and dangerous distractions that need an expiration date.

The emotional issue of whether time limits should be imposed on public grieving has landed squarely at the door of Canadian municipalities.

The Toronto-area suburb of Vaughan has proposed keeping an inventory of memorials and requiring that they be taken down after a year.

Calgary has commissioned an academic study to determine how people feel about the shrines and whether they affect driver behaviour.

Officials in Prince Albert, Sask., were criticized this summer for considering a policy that would require a memorial be taken down three months after a person's death.

Now Winnipeg is reviewing the rules about how long remembrances of a departed friend or family member should stay in place.

"I can't believe, at the end of the day, anyone who is grieving a loved one would have an honest expectation that a memorial in these types of circumstances should exist forever," says Winnipeg Coun. Gord Steeves. "I just can't imagine that."

The debate was sparked in his neighbourhood by a roadside memorial to two men who died more than a year ago. It was taken down twice while someone put up a sign suggesting that the dead should be remembered in a cemetery.

Most cities have quietly ignored the fact that such shrines break the law, says Steeves, who adds that it's time for politicians to take responsibility and set time limits.

"It is unacceptable to me that this horrible incident can manifest itself again and again through acrimony in the community."

Bruce Miller, a Nova Scotia police officer, was driving to a hunting lodge in Prince Edward Island five years ago when he was killed by a drunk driver. Until a roadside memorial was erected in his honour, the site was just a non-descript strip of road, suggests his mother, Margaret Miller.

"You're driving by the scene and there is no record," says Miller, who is the Canadian president of Mothers Against Drunk Driving. "When you put up this memorial, all of a sudden that place is designated as some place that was important to the family. It just hasn't been forgotten."

But Miller agrees they should be regulated in some way. "We can't just randomly be putting things up by the roadside."