The New Pathway is continuing its series of articles presenting prominent Ukrainian Canadians and their businesses. Many in our community know James Cardinal, owner of Cardinal Funeral Homes Ltd., the oldest funeral home company in the Ukrainian community in the GTA. Jim Cardinal is also a big supporter of many Ukrainian Canadian organizations and events. To put a face behind those accomplishments, the New Pathway interviewed Mr. Cardinal.
NP: How and when did your family business start?
JC: My grandfather James Cardinal started the business in 1925 in a small town Fort William, Ontario, which is now Thunder Bay. From there, he ran the business until early 1940s when he moved down to Toronto, to our current location.
My dad Leo Cardinal, during World War Two, was a flight sergeant and a pilot with the Royal Canadian Air Force. He flew Mosquito bombers and was a pathfinder doing bombing runs over Germany. After the war, he was offered a commission to stay in the Airforce which he accepted. He was a flight instructor in Gimley, Manitoba and then in London, Ontario, for about five years. After that, he worked together with his father until my grandfather died in 1960.
My father continued the business and built the Annette Street location in 1965. Then I got my licence in 1982 and worked with my dad for a couple of years until his death in 1984. I’ve been running the company ever since and both my boys are in the business now. They are both licenced funeral directors and will be the fourth generation. I hope to retire in the next two to three years and they will be taking over.
NP: What is you connection to Ukraine?
JC: All my grandparents came from Ukraine when they were young. My grandfather James Cardinal came from Chortkiv, now in Ternopil Oblast, to the United States in the 19th century at about seven years of age. He served with the Americans in World War One for a couple of years and then moved to Canada, I guess, he felt there were more opportunities here. He was in the lumber business cutting down trees in the area of Fort William, Ontario, prior to becoming a funeral director. His wife Anna, my grandmother, was also born in Ukraine, and came to Canada as a young woman. She met my grandfather James in Thunder Bay.
My mom’s half of the family are also from Ukraine and they settled in the Brockville area. My grandfather Dan Korsa was in the hotel business. When he came to Canada, he started as a busboy in the Chateau Laurier hotel in Ottawa. After the years of the hard work he saved enough money and bought his own hotel in Brockville, Ontario. Both my parents were born in Canada, so, I am a second generation Canadian.
Both my grandfathers died before I was born, but my grandmother and my parents spoke Ukrainian at home. When I and my sister were little kids, we were taken to the Ukrainian school, on the weekends. It was based out of St. Demetrius Catholic Church on La Rose, before they even built the new church. But, unfortunately, I wasn’t a very good student. My mom would drop me off and I would wave good-bye to her, and I’d go and play baseball with my friends.
NP: Tell us about your family’s involvement in the Ukrainian Canadian community.
JC: Both my grandfathers were in the service industry, the hotel and the funeral business. At the time when they started, they were the first Ukrainians to own a funeral home or a hotel in Ontario. So, James Cardinal’s was the Ukrainian funeral home there and everybody knew him and would come to him. He was involved with the churches and the community. I never knew him but I’ve heard stories about him – he was a very funny guy, everybody liked him, he was a big strong man, and had a personality that everybody gravitated to. He was generous and helped a lot of families who couldn’t afford funerals at the time, whether they could pay him or not. I can look back at some old records of the company from the 1930-40s – if say a grocer or anyone couldn’t afford a funeral, he would trade potatoes or services for it.
My father was very involved in the Ukrainian community, he was one of the founding members of the Knights of Columbus, a member of St. Demetrius Church for many years and a proud supporter of the Church and all Ukrainian events in the city. We continue to do so, whether it’s Bloor Street Festival, or the Ukrainian Care Centre, or the churches. We are certainly proud of our heritage. We are also proud of the fact that the Ukrainian community has used us for many years and we have a great relationship with the community.
NP: You’ve been in the Ukrainian community for many years. Have you noticed any changes in the community?
JC: The thing that I’ve noticed is that Ukrainians, maybe more than other nationalities, maybe the same, but it’s very important for them to send their kids to school and to college and university. The first waves of our immigrants when they came here they were labourers and uneducated, they didn’t speak the language, but they all worked very hard and raised their families on strong traditional values. They encouraged their kids to go to school and to better themselves.
And my generation have benefited from that, where today there are many many professionals that are Ukrainian – we have people in government, in politics, in sports, in movies. We are a strong, vibrant community, not only in Toronto but right across Canada, we’ve contributed in many ways to the society. We started off contributing in the railway building for example, but today we are leaders in government, in business, you can look in any field and there is a Ukrainian on top of the heap, we are helping to shape this country. Every generation of Ukrainian Canadians, that comes along, is doing better than their parents did. Hard work pays off, I think it’s built to us.
NP: What’s the share of Ukrainians in your clientele?
JC: I would say probably up to 50%. There are two funeral homes on Annette Street and our clients there are almost all Ukrainian. Out of our Bathurst location, being right downtown, we do a lot of Portuguese funerals. Collectively, between our locations we have 34 employees.
NP: What is changing in your business?
JC: The big thing today is the use of technology with computers and the internet and cellphones. We use social media, we have a facebook, so we connect to people on a social level. We now create dvds and movies. But by and large, traditions of the funerals haven’t changed the whole lot within the Ukrainian community. The big thing, maybe, before a lot of funerals would have two days visitations. But today people cut back on visitation time.
If I look outside of the Ukrainian community, a big change is the rise in cremation. There is a number of reasons to that and I think the biggest reason is that people don’t have a sense of home anymore, they are very mobile and move across the country. So, people have cremation because they don’t want to buy a cemetery plot as everybody is scattered all over the country.
Another thing is cost, as prices for everything today are rising, including for funerals. Cemetery costs, especially in the city of Toronto are very high. When I first started in the business, a grave in the city if Toronto was 300-400 dollars. Today, it would be a luck to find anything under 10 thousand dollars, let alone having all the other expenses – a funeral, a monument. Certainly, we see that the prices have gotten more expensive and we do our best to keep our costs down as much as we can. Our profit margins have certainly gone down from my father’s days, but that’s just a fact of life. We keep looking at other ways how to serve people better. It’s not about the caskets and the black cars, it’s about service, being with the people at the time of need, at the worst moment of their life, and helping them through that time with compassion and care.
We’ve been running for four generations, we are celebrating our 90th anniversary this year and we are proud of that fact, there are not so many companies that have been around for 90 years. Obviously, we are doing something right that people appreciate and we certainly don’t take it for granted.
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