Indigenous and Northern Affairs Committee on Feb. 6th, 2018

[Matt Miller]

I'd like to quantify that a bit more. In the municipal sector there is difficulty retaining volunteers, and the first nations sector is 10 times worse. The reason it is 10 times worse is that we don't get treated as well as our municipal brothers and sisters. We don't have the ability to retain volunteers and to be able to say, “We'll provide you with this training if you stay with us. We'll support you when you see your cousin has passed away in front of you. We'll be able to provide support mechanisms for you and your family to deal with the tragedies that you have to deal with on a regular basis.” We do not have those resources in the first nations fire protection sector, and it's something that is lacking and needs to be addressed.

As far as retention goes, we do live in a different social world now. People aren't beating down the doors to become volunteer firefighters and to run into burning buildings anymore, but for me, what I have just mentioned to you are some of the biggest things facing our community and many of the other Ontario region first nations.

[The Chair, Liberal, MaryAnn Mihychuk]

We need to move on.

The final round of questioning goes to MP Saganash.

[Romeo Saganash, NDP, Abitibi—Baie-James—Nunavik—Eeyou, QC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you to all of our guests today for this first panel.

I'm happy I heard a lot of things that both of you, Mr. Miller and Mr. Peters, mentioned that I can relate to. I come from a northern remote community, and we'll be hearing from the fire chief in my own community later on.

I do understand that the data problem is a serious one and that we need to get on with that as well if we are serious about protecting our people and our communities.

You mentioned the need for a legislative framework for communities to report the number of fires they have in their communities, the casualties and so on and so forth. The need for a national strategy plan is important as well. I can totally relate to that.

I want both of you to address some of the other challenges that communities face. I'm glad you mentioned that you visited many of the Ontario communities as well. I've been to the Maritimes. I visited your own community, as a matter of fact, last summer. I was greeted with a box of lobster when I arrived.

With respect to the other challenges, such as infrastructure and equipment and all of the other resources, as well as training, I totally agree with you in that respect. You seem to be very well organized in your own community.

What are some of the remaining challenges that you can think of? This study is going to lead to recommendations to the government, and we want to make sure those recommendations are to the point in terms of our communities' needs.

[Matt Miller]

My wife is actually from a remote first nation, and I used to work for Ornge air ambulance, which was the air ambulance provider for the fly-in communities in Ontario. That's where my initial contact was made, so when I visit those communities, it's something I take to heart.

The challenges they face in the north are significantly more difficult than what we would see in the semi-remote areas or in the central or southern Ontario regions. When something as simple as a light bulb burning out on your fire truck happens, it's not an easy matter of going to the local store and grabbing a light and putting it back in your truck. In the north, it takes weeks to get those pieces or parts that you need for your emergency vehicles. If there's a fire and the fire suit or bunker gear suit that we wear becomes damaged, when we send it off in the south, we get it back in two days, and it's repaired. In the north, you're looking at weeks and you're looking at thousands of dollars.

The barriers they have to being able to provide adequate service in the remote communities and semi-remote communities seriously need to be looked at and addressed from a fundamental financial support and funding standpoint. You have to consider the costs that are associated with those basic requirements.

I used to live in Moosonee when I worked for Ornge. It was a fly-in community, or you could get there by train. A Delissio pizza was $25. That's just a pizza. That's not even a fire helmet, fire gloves, or a fire hose. That's a pizza. When you get into the communities further north, such as Peawanuck, which is one of the most northern communities in Ontario, a $100 pair of fire gloves is going to cost $600 or maybe even more. That's something that needs to be considered.

I want to address the training aspect, because from all the discussions I had with the different remote and semi-remote communities, I noted there are trust issues. We talk about trust and truth and reconciliation here. Because of all of the different things that have happened to us as first nations people through all these different generations, we have trust issues not only with governmental agencies but with each other, within communities. For us to rebuild those relationships.... It took me a number of times and many hours of discussion to get people to actually believe that I genuinely cared. If that's the aspect of problems that I'm running into, from a training standpoint, I can't just go and grab a couple of first nations people from a first nation community, bring them down south, train them, and think it's going to be good. That relationship needs to be built there. That mentorship needs to be involved. Trust needs to be built up again.

With respect to comfort, many of the people we talked to don't want to go to Thunder Bay because of the racism in that city. This is what they've told me. I've lived in Thunder Bay myself, so when they tell me that they would like to do training in a first nation, we say okay and ask what we can do. We have a training academy in Six Nations, but it's way down south. Our recommendation was to have three different training sites in first nations communities—one southern, one central, and one in the Sioux Lookout area, such as at the Lac Seul First Nation.

Many of the people we talked to were very comfortable with going to another first nation to receive training from a professional first nation person. These are things that we looked at and addressed, and we put them into our strategic plan.

I don't want to go over my time in answering your question.

[Romeo Saganash, NDP, Abitibi—Baie-James—Nunavik—Eeyou, QC]

Mr. Peters, would you comment?

[Allan Peters]

The underfunding is a big thing in the Atlantic region when you look at the fire stations, the fire trucks, and even the turnout gear. Some of the reserves have to pull the fire truck out first and then let their firefighters run in to get to their turnout gear. Even with that situation, you're exposing the firefighters to carcinogens. Most likely, we're going to be having cancer. We're exposing them to that. In responding to the fires and returning with the turnout gear, there are proper techniques that are supposed to be followed. We are bringing in carcinogens from house fires with a combination of elements that are burning in there. It's in your turnout gear, and you're exposing the station to it.

With the lack of funding, we don't have the luxury of following the standard operating guidelines, the SOGs, that have to be followed. The Atlantic region is seriously underfunded. There are stations with fire trucks that are 20 or 30 years old. They try to make do with what they have. When you come out and see something outside, you notice that they have modern equipment, and you can see how far behind we are.

We're slowly getting up. With the enthusiasm of some of the new firefighters who come into the game, you have people sparking up the old guys again, and they're getting into fundraising. They are able to bring a little more equipment in. After a while, though, the trend starts again. This group gets old, and you're working on the new ones again.

[Romeo Saganash, NDP, Abitibi—Baie-James—Nunavik—Eeyou, QC]

I was wondering if we got a copy of the strategic plan of the chiefs of Ontario. Did we receive that? I'd like to see a copy of it.

[The Chair, Liberal, MaryAnn Mihychuk]

Have we received a copy of the strategic plan?

[Romeo Saganash, NDP, Abitibi—Baie-James—Nunavik—Eeyou, QC]

It was referred to—

[Matt Miller]

I'll forward it.

[The Chair, Liberal, MaryAnn Mihychuk]

Good.

Thank you so much. You've provided a lot of information from your respective areas. My sincere thanks for that.

We're going to call the next panel forward so that we can continue with the hearing. We're going to pause now.

[The Chair, Liberal, MaryAnn Mihychuk]

Welcome. I'm pleased you're here. I see that we have an intervention by MP Anandasangaree.

[Gary Anandasangaree, Liberal, Scarborough—Rouge Park, ON]

Madam Chair, I wonder if we could go to seven-minute presentations by our panels and maybe a five-minute round for us, since we don't have a lot of time.

[The Chair, Liberal, MaryAnn Mihychuk]

Do we have agreement on seven-minute presentations?

Go ahead, Ms. McLeod.

[Cathy McLeod, Conservative, Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo, BC]

If the presenters can do that, we would welcome additional information, which we'll make sure to read. Unfortunately, the votes got in the way. If there is something critical, I don't want to hang tight to that.

[The Chair, Liberal, MaryAnn Mihychuk]

Go ahead, MP Saganash.

[Romeo Saganash, NDP, Abitibi—Baie-James—Nunavik—Eeyou, QC]

I sort of feel bad for our witnesses to try to limit their interventions, especially knowing that Mr. Saganash Stringer drove from Waswanipi to here last night. That's a pretty long drive just to....

[The Chair, Liberal, MaryAnn Mihychuk]

If possible, try to tighten your presentations.

The Micmacs are on the phone. Franklin Condo, are you there?

[Franklin Condo, Director of Public Security, Micmacs of Gesgapegiag]

Yes.

I'm Franklin Condo, public security director for Gesgapegiag.

[The Chair, Liberal, MaryAnn Mihychuk]

Welcome. We're here in Ottawa on the unceded territory of the Algonquin people. We're going to begin the presentations, which will be of approximately seven minutes. Try to keep it tight. If you have a longer brief or a brief at all, please submit it. You can use email or leave it with the clerk. We would appreciate it.

Starting out, we have the Cree First Nation, represented by Timothy Saganash. That's seems to be a very common last name.

[Timothy Saganash Stringer, Fire Chief, Cree First Nation of Waswanipi Fire Department]

Thank you so much, Madam Chair, for the honour of being here. Wachiya. Hello. Bonjour.

I'm presenting here today from the Cree First Nation of Waswanipi. I had a PowerPoint presentation, but I only found out on Thursday night about this, so although I did the best I could, I failed to submit it on time. I'll be just looking over notes. I gave a copy to Mr. MacPherson to hand out after the fact.

My name is Timothy Saganash Stringer. I'm the fire chief of Waswanipi. I've been the fire chief there for five years. I've been a certified firefighter for 15 years, levels 1 and 2, and I also have extensive training in instructing and in fire officers, which are very important courses.

In 2003, I graduated in Alberta. I'm from Quebec. The reason it was Alberta is that in Quebec all the courses are mainly in French. As Crees, we were looking for somewhere that has a very good rescue equipment that we could actually get our hands on and actually get the real feeling of experience. We went to Lakeland College in Vermilion, Alberta. They have a program called “fire etc.” That's why I graduated from over there.

It's been a goal of mine to be a firefighter since I was a kid, so here I am today, in the big House. Thank you again for having me. I'm honoured.

In Waswanipi, we have a mission statement that we let all our volunteers know, protecting our community any time, any place. The mission statement is this: “Through dedication and professionalism, members of the Waswanipi Fire Department cares and protects lives, property, and environment of our community through incident response, comprehensive training, public education, and fire prevention.”

The community of Waswanipi is located in northern Quebec, just north of the 49th parallel. We're a population of about 2,500 people, give or take, with doctors, teachers, and people who come in from out of town to help. Our department consists of five full-time employees—the fire chief, deputy fire chief, fire prevention officer, and also two captains—as well as contracted employees whom we hire through a special program. As well, we have 15 volunteers.

I wish I could put up the map here. I have a nice little map. You'll get an idea of it after the fact. We're about 122 kilometres away from a community that's south of us, so incident response time in getting the support that we need is too late. They're going to show up and help us pick up our hoses at that point. There's another community, Chapais, which 93 kilometres north. Again, if there's a burning house or we need more personnel to help us out, we're on our own. We're really on our own.

I also have another nice picture of the whole province of Quebec, showing all the native communities, the Cree native communities. Whapmagoostui is an isolated community. It's conjoined with the Inuit. There's no road to get there at this point. As you can just imagine, when they have a vehicle they need repaired, well, they have to send it on a boat and wait three or four months till it comes back. That's one big.... We need to fix something up for that.

You have to fly to get to the next community, Chisasibi. A couple of more hours away you get Wemindji, and a couple more hours away, Eastmain. Inland you have Nemaska. Again, on the southern part of James Bay, we have Waskaganish. We're the community that's the farthest south in the Cree nation, Waswanipi. Just northeast of us are Oujé-Bougoumou and Mistissini. We're all about two or three hours away from each other.

For my drive, to get here today, it took me seven hours. All the manufacturers are based around Montreal, Ottawa, and Toronto. Every time somebody has a truck to fix—well, as you can imagine, if you're living way up north, it's 15 to 20 hours to come down with a fire truck. As the presenters before me said, my fellow Mi'kmaq brothers, to change a light bulb is a lot more complicated than it seems. It's a big task. It shouldn't be that hard; unfortunately, but it is.

My fire department consists of four emergency vehicles: a first responder pickup truck; an aerial ladder truck, the year 2011; a 2000 pumper truck, which has a lot of water within it; and a rescue truck that has a bunch of emergency tools. We're very fortunate in my region.

I can imagine that in other departments.... I've visited other departments in Canada where they have just a simple garage with one truck they don't touch, or three bunker gears, and that's it. That's their fire department. We've benefited by having a bit of support from the federal government and support from our regional government because of the mining, the forestry, and the hydro.

Our fire department has other needs that we have identified. All the fire chiefs in my region get together at least four times a year just to go over problems and our goals to make our service better. We identified certain needs, such as rescue boats. Those are hard for us to obtain. We have big lakes. James Bay is right on the coast, and we don't even have rescue boats.

As for Ski-Doos, some departments have fought and got them, but our department is fighting to try to get that type of rescue equipment. It's hard. We get a lot of snow. Winter is nine months a year for us.

There's also a need for four-wheelers. A lot of the roads are rural and they're not paved. To get to people's camps for search and rescue we need four-wheelers to try to access them with rescue sleds.

We also need specialized all-terrain vehicles. There are a variety of what they could be, along with their equipment. We need a tanker truck that could hold lots of water. We're fortunate in our community to have hydrants, but they don't go down the road to our dump. We have a lot of dump fires, unfortunately, and forest fires in the area.

I have a nice picture of my organogram—fire chief, deputy fire chief, fire prevention officer, two captains, two lieutenants, and the volunteer firefighters below that—but when I first started, I was alone. I was one person doing fire prevention and the one person doing the maintenance on the truck. I fought with my band—not fought; we worked together—and it was beneficial to employ more people so we could take proper care, do proper training, and also serve the public in fire prevention. These are very important, in my opinion.

I'm so thankful for volunteers, although just like the community that presented before, it's hard to recruit volunteers from 2,500 people. Not everybody wants to be a firefighter. We're constantly trying to encourage people and we try to work with them and try to give them prizes to stick with us, but retaining them afterwards is another challenge on its own. They try it for a year and then decide it is not for them. We need the manpower in our departments.

I was outside a few minutes ago talking with my captain, Terrence Dixon. He was telling me that they're asking us to do certain services in the community, but we don't have anybody on call. There are just four of them right now. We shouldn't have this problem.

In my department, out of the 23 guys and girls we have—and we do have girls as well, which we're very proud of—most of us are under the age of 25. Saying they've been a firefighter for five-plus years is rare in my department. I've also worked on the south shore of Montreal, in Saint-Basile, and there are firefighters there who are 30, 40, and 50 years old, and those veterans taught a lot of the young guys. That was most important, and I wondered why.... I have tried recruiting people with licences because there are only five of us in the department who have licences, and it's very difficult. It's another challenge in the north to have people to go—it's an hour and a half away, one-way—to get their licence. You have to do that twice, plus the amount of time to do your driving course. Today when you go to the driver's bureau, you have to do all the courses before you actually.... It's a lot of time, it's a lot of money, and it's far, so that's why it's another struggle for us to get licences in the communities.

I have a slide here that shows the average salary of fire chiefs or fire personnel in general. We're $20,000 below the minimum salary in a lot of these positions. Why does a 40-year-old not want to work at the fire department? Because we can't even pay him. He can be a janitor somewhere else and make more money, unfortunately. At $15 an hour, you put your life on the line and absorb all these toxins. You're essentially going to join the fire department and get cancer when you retire, unfortunately. That's the new....

I'll try to speed it up. I have a list of my certified—

[The Chair, Liberal, MaryAnn Mihychuk]

You've actually got to wrap it up, buddy.

[Timothy Saganash Stringer]

I've put down some of the challenges from the very start.

The 911 system is not in place in our communities. You have to know the number of the fire department, the police department. If you're driving through a community and you're not aware of the numbers, how are you going to be safe if you have an accident? If you call 911, you're going to have somebody come from three hours away.

I wish I had more time with all of you today.

[The Chair, Liberal, MaryAnn Mihychuk]

We're going to have some more time with questions.

[Timothy Saganash Stringer]

Perfect. Okay.