Thank you so much.
Please thank your local firefighters for me.
A few of you mentioned the important community service that firefighters and fire halls play all over this country. Whether it be volunteering for Christmas basket donations or local funding and food drives and so on, firefighters do more than just put out fires, as you said.
There's a changing face of firefighting in Canada where we're now actually seeing that putting what they call “water on fire” is less and less of what they do. When it comes to the changing face of firefighting, this bill and Todd Doherty's bill—I don't want to say Todd Doherty's bill, because it's a law—are a bit of a blessing and a curse, because with the increased awareness of PTSD and cancers in firefighting also comes the difficulty in recruitment and retention.
I was talking to the Canadian Association of Fire Chiefs about the reality that people may not consider a career in firefighting because they don't want to get cancer or PTSD. Bringing out this awareness also brings out some challenges. We can also say with those challenges that we're doing something about them. Whether it be the road to mental readiness resiliency training that we see in the Canadian Armed Forces—which many firefighters and first responders are now following—or saying that we recognize cancer in firefighting and we're doing something about it with this national framework to bring people together around the table to figure out how we prevent it, I think will alleviate some of people's fears in considering a career in firefighting.
As our previous colleague had mentioned, growing up everyone wanted to be a firefighter or a police officer. Fortunately nobody ever said, “I want to be a politician.”