BC Coroners Service

B.C. Conservative Leader John Rustad has changed his story about seeing a man die of a drug overdose on his way to a televised election debate, after the BC Coroners Service said it had no record of such a death where he said it occurred.

Mounties in British Columbia have concluded there's no evidence that the devastating fire that swept through the community of Lytton more than three years ago was arson.

Plans for supervised consumption sites sometimes result in a community backlash but the response in the Metro Vancouver community of Richmond, population 210,000, has been intense and protracted, lasting long after authorities said in mid-February that a proposal to explore the idea had been scrapped. 

Advocates for renters in British Columbia say it's time to consider setting a maximum temperature for rental housing to protect vulnerable tenants from dangerous heat.

A heat wave that is expected to last most of next week has prompted British Columbia's government to warn people to prepare for sweltering conditions, but a repeat of the deadly 2021 heat dome isn't being forecast.

British Columbia's coroner has issued a public safety bulletin about wildfire smoke, saying the death of a nine-year-old boy had been "confirmed by his parents" to have been related to a medical condition aggravated by the smoke.

The figure marks a departure from the average of two to three annual flu deaths among children in the province between 2015 and 2019, data from the BC Coroners Service shows.

The toxic drug crisis in British Columbia was a key factor in pushing the number of deaths of homeless people up by 75 per cent in 2021 compared with the year before, the BC Coroners Service says.

British Columbia has lost more than 10,000 lives to illicit drugs since the province declared a public health emergency in April 2016, chief coroner Lisa Lapointe says.

A year after the heat dome event that killed billions of plants and animals in British Columbia, scientists say ecosystems are recovering, but could be transformed forever if such events become more frequent.

The British Columbia government's inadequate support during an extreme heat wave this summer "compounded risks" for people with disabilities and those who are older, says an independent international human rights group.

The BC Wildfire Service says flames in the hills on the southeast side of Skaha Lake, east of Okanagan Falls, were reported Sunday and had charred an estimated five square kilometres of the rural area within hours.

A team that ventured into Lytton, B.C., for the first time since the village was ravaged by a wildfire this week found two bodies, the provincial coroners service said on Saturday, July 3, 2021, evening.

Leslie McBain of Moms Stop the Harm, an advocacy group of thousands of mothers who have lost children to toxic drugs, said the province needs to go beyond taking incremental steps to deal with the health crisis.