As a motorcycle rider and collector, Dr. Jatinder (Taj) Baidwan can tell you how riding brings him as close to the feeling of flight as possible while still grounded. As the province’s top coroner, he’ll also tell you how deadly it can be.
“There’s 55 motorcyclists who die every year on our roads, and that’s an entirely preventable death,” said Baidwan, appointed to a five-year term as B.C.’s chief coroner in August.
Baidwan is taking over from Lisa Lapointe, who left the post after 13 years.
Baidwan, who gave his first sit-down interview to the Times Colonist, is planning to deliver more data on preventable deaths of all types, including those related to intimate partner violence, sextortion, alcohol, motorbikes, accidents and trauma — while enhancing the way reports on toxic drug deaths are delivered.
“It is time for us to take an intentional break,” Baidwan said of the regular statistics on toxic drug deaths that have dominated the news since the illicit-opioid crisis was declared a public health emergency in 2016.
“We put out our monthly bit of paper that says this number of people died this month — honestly, I don’t even think [most] people read it anymore.”
The public watchdog wants to be more thoughtful and non-political about how the data mined, measured, analyzed and shared on toxic drug deaths is presented in order to make a “difference to the conversation” going forward.
“I’m not saying we’re going to just stop doing the work that we’re doing, that will continue,” he said.
“We’ve now got to get better at shining a light on all of our work.”
A new approach on drug deaths
The coroners service has an annual budget of $26.7 million, according to the 2023-2024 annual service plan report, and employs fewer than 200 people, including about 70 part-time community coroners. Of about 45,000 deaths in the province last year, 14,000 were reported to the coroners service for investigation.
On the drug overdose front, Baidwan said he will move focus beyond the street-entrenched to the majority of toxic drug deaths: men ages 30 to 50 in blue-collar jobs, from truck drivers to construction workers. “Those are the ones that are using in their homes” and dying alone.
Baidwan denies he or his independent office are getting muzzled by the province on the heels of Lisa Lapointe’s vocal criticisms of drug policy and the lack of accessible residential addictions treatment services.
“Am I stepping back, or is it someone in government telling me I’ve got to step back?… Absolutely not,” Baidwan said. “I have got free rein to talk about whatever I want to talk about.”
Lapointe’s support for decriminalization, overdose prevention sites, and safer supply hit a political brick wall in November 2023.
That’s when a death review panel recommended expanding safer supply drugs to include drugs such as heroin and cocaine without a prescription to more of the 225,000 people in B.C. who use unregulated drugs and are at risk of being poisoned.
But before Lapointe could publicly deliver the 48-page report, the province blindsided the chief coroner, rejecting its primary recommendation.
The next month, Lapointe announced her pending retirement. She left frustrated and disappointed in February 2024 and supported the B.C. Greens in the fall provincial election.
By spring, the province’s decriminalization experiment was rolled back to recriminalize public drug use, and plans for overdose prevention sites at three Vancouver Island hospitals were paused.
The case for good data
Baidwan won’t weigh in with his “personal opinions” on hot-button drug policy issues.
As a public servant, he said, his job is to produce high-quality data for policy-makers and elected officials — in this case the Health Ministry — and then measure the outcomes of their decisions.
Baidwan, 56, a former ER physician, hospitalist, family doctor, Island Health executive vice-president and chief medical officer, as well as medical officer for the British Army and Household Cavalry, has had a front-row seat to the chief coroner’s job for more than seven years now.
He most recently served as chief medical officer under Lapointe, since 2017.
“I like her immensely,” Baidwan said. “Would I have done the same thing that she did? I think it’s difficult to say, because the world changed, and this problem came about, and she got, I think, swept up with it.”
In 2016, toxic drug overdose deaths shot up with the arrival of the highly potent and addictive opioid fentanyl, still the drug detected in about 80 per cent of the approximate six illicit-drug deaths that occur each day in B.C.. More than 14,000 people in the province have died from drug poisoning since 2016.
Another part of his “intentional step back” is to ensure that subject experts on death review panels are well balanced.
“Did we do that in the past?” Baidwan asked. “Did we have enough people that were perhaps naysayers against all the things that we wrote about? Were they present?
“Because if they weren’t present, does that do us any good as a society, as British Columbia? And that’s the problem that I have at the moment.”
Addressing health inequities
Baidwan said that one statistic he learned during his time with Island Health is ingrained in him: For every hour that you drive north from Victoria on Vancouver Island, life expectancy goes down by a year. By the time you get to the tip of the Island, which is more populated by First Nations, life expectancy is about seven years less.
With those kinds of inequities top of mind, Baidwan wants to create a more robust and responsive coroners service.
“We need to have the right people trained in the right way doing those investigations, we need to be able to put the right analysis on it, and we need to be able to collaborate with the different parts of government to try and sort of make sure that we get policy change happening in the right direction,” Baidwan said.
That could mean seizing a learning opportunity such as the 2021 heat dome that was linked to the deaths of 619 British Columbians.
A notice was sent to doctors and nurse practitioners through the College of Physicians and Surgeons warning of potential deaths. Heat-related deaths were to be classified as such — even if they had a chronic illness or other health-related matter that, if not for the heat, the individual likely would have lived with for many more years.
The statistics that came from a death review panel on the heat dome went on to shape public policy to prevent future heat deaths.
“That’s the value of what a higher functioning coroners service can do,” Baidwan said.
He’s also considering ways of generating more cross-Canada data on climate-related deaths.
“To me, the world is about data, and it’s becoming more and more about that, and we’ve got to get good at doing that,” he said.
The importance of service
Baidwan, the middle child of three — all in the medical field — was raised in London, England, by his parents, who emigrated from India in 1962. His father, Beant Singh Baidwan, 88, was a barrister and accountant, and his mother, Gurcharan Kaur Baidwan, 80, worked in the Tetley Tea factory.
Baidwan joined the British Army at the age of 15 “much to my parents’ chagrin,” and spent 20 years there as a physician.
In 2007, Baidwan and family moved to Canada. They now live in Burnaby, and he commutes to Victoria as needed.
With Mani, his wife of 27 years, he has three children — 17-year-old twins going to school in Maple Ridge, and a 26-year-old who is in England.
Baidwan said education and service are important family values. His father, he said, is “excited” for him being the chief coroner because for him it’s not about the money you earn but what meaningful contribution you make while on Earth.
“I really wanted this job simply because I think this is probably the last job I’m going to do,” he said. “It’s not about the dollar. It isn’t about titles. It isn’t about letters after your name. It is about doing something that’s going to make a real difference.”
Otherwise he’d be happy to golf and ride his motorbikes, which include a 1957 Indian Woodsman and a new BMW.
Baidwan said he’s working with ICBC and RoadSafetyBC and putting together a small death review panel to understand why and how motorcyclists are dying on B.C.’s roads. Preliminary data generally suggest the greater the training, the less likely one is to succumb to a fatal crash.
Baidwan points to police officers, who are well trained and rarely die in crashes.
An experienced motorcyclist foresees the trouble ahead and rather than hard braking, learns how to steer around trouble, he said.
“You go past,” Baidwan said. “It’s a life-saving skill.”
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