Thank you, Madam Chair, for the invitation to appear before the committee. I would like to acknowledge unceded Algonquin territory.
I am Chief Matilda Ramjattan. I'm from the small community of Lennox Island. Our membership is a little over 1,000. About half of those live on reserve. Of two first nations in P.E.I., Lennox Island is one.
Our community has three reserves. One is populated. Abegweit has three reserves, and all of them are populated. We are on the western part of the island, and they're in the eastern part of the island. They do not have fire safety service within the community. They do have volunteers in other communities.
In my community, we've had a fire department for about 40 years. It started with just little backpacks of water. After a house fire burned down a home that had 13 living there, who then were all homeless and were put throughout the island, the men decided that they had to do something. They were able to start their fire department with a few men with just those backpacks.
In our community now, we have 24 volunteer fire members altogether. Fourteen of them are medical first responders. We have two certified pump operators. We have three licensed drivers, which again is an issue, because our community is a fishing community, and if they're fishing.... Somebody has to drive that truck, but we only have the three drivers. We have one level 1 firefighter, so training is definitely an issue. The fire chief is working towards his hazardous material awareness training, because when he did his training, it wasn't mandatory, but now it is.
We definitely have to work on some infrastructure as well. We also need some other things, such as a new pumper truck and an all-terrain vehicle.
I will show you a quick picture of our community. It's shaped like a pork chop. I'll show you where most of us live. We would like to have some fire roads, because although there are walking trails, we can't get our truck back there. We're an island off P.E.I., and the closest city is about 55 kilometres away. We do operate with mutual aid within 50 kilometres around us.
Our medical first responders have increased from three to 14, and we do have men and women. Last year, they responded to about 200 calls, with 30 calls in terms of mutual aid. The thing is that our people are volunteers, and resources for them, as much as they want to help.... We are an isolated community. If we don't help, we won't get help. You know from other communities that this has happened; they will not respond because somebody didn't pay the cheque or something, and funding was held up somewhere.
In the summer, spring, and fall, it's easy to get access to our community, but we are an isolated community in the winter months. Even our bridge sometimes will fill up so much that we can't get off the reserve, so trying to have an emergency response to medical situations can be challenging in the winter months.
A lot of the issues that have been spoken about already are ours as well, but I wanted to make a note too that it's not only about fire safety. It's about emergency management. In terms of emergency management in the Atlantic, with the Mi'kmaq Confederacy of PEI we had a health emergency management coordinator who helped to build capacity within our communities. We also went to the housing and infrastructure network at the Atlantic Policy Congress level, which helped build the capacity of all the first nations in the region.
That funding was cut, so there is nobody in that position now. There is none. I believe that could be a real asset to help build capacity within the region in emergency management and health emergency management. We had to activate a shelter back in 2010, when we had water surge and an ice storm, as you know. We had to put our warming centre up, and 24-hour care is really difficult when you don't have the trained individuals for that situation. That's what we found. In terms of infrastructure, we used the school, which was identified in our emergency plan. However, when we actually went to use it and we had all those people in there, the bathrooms were not flushing because the power was out and our generator kicked in for just the minimum. Those sorts of things will be an issue, because when the power goes out, there's minimal electricity, just to keep the heat and lights on, and the plugs don't work. You have all these children and elders in there, and it's a recipe for disaster.
Even though we are talking about fire safety overall, at a higher level of thinking, emergency management in general needs more capacity building in our communities, and we need someone in our communities to do that.
In my community, we don't have a salary for our fire department. We get $25,000 for our fire department. That's pretty much it. That has to cover the lights and the heat and maintenance of the truck and what have you. We need a new building.
There are issues that are building up. We're trying to do the best we can with what we have, but we definitely need help, because we're just going to collapse in on ourselves. As this man just stated, we're trying our best with what we have, but eventually volunteers may give up on us, and that's something we have to keep our attention on overall.