Health committee  Certainly. Thank you for your question. It's an excellent one. First of all, as I indicated previously, one of our responsibilities is to determine the cause and origin of fires in the majority of jurisdictions across the country. By doing our analysis, quite often we're finding

Health committee  Most certainly. What I would offer is that one of the responsibilities of fire services across the country is to determine the cause and origin of fires, and we also respond to medical first-responder calls and so forth. From that perspective, first of all, we provide that boots

Health committee  I concur with my colleague in that regard. I believe that further analysis could obviously derive perhaps additional methods in which to enhance this, but I believe at this time we should be poised to move forward.

Health committee  Thank you, Madam Chair. I'm the fire chief in Saint John, New Brunswick. I am appearing before you today in my capacity as the president of the Canadian Association of Fire Chiefs, a national organization representing 1,000 fire chiefs located in every province and territory. C

Finance committee  As far as quantitatively trying to determine the optimum level, that came out of a recommendation from consultation with fire chiefs across the country. However, as previously indicated, in our dialogue with the finance department we indicated that we were absolutely open to havi

Finance committee  Certainly, that is a valid consideration. We recognize that in any organization, with the bell curve, you have those who are contributing much more than those who perhaps are not contributing as much. In our discussions with the senior officials from the finance department, we ha

Finance committee  Mr. Chair, in anticipation of the interest of this committee and our parliamentarians, I can offer that we have a very robust method by which to monitor and to audit this function. We have our town and village councils and mayors, who have a responsibility with their fire chiefs

Finance committee  An overarching consideration here is the requirement to maintain accurate logs with respect to workers' compensation. Whether you are participating in any of the core functions of the fire service—whether it be emergency response, public education, training, or what have you—it's

Finance committee  The Finance officials have been very open in our dialogue with them. They recognize the integrity of the fire service across the country and have every confidence that we will adhere to those requirements.

Finance committee  Mr. Chair, that's an excellent question. I thank Ms. Block for bringing that forward. The compilation of that 200 hours includes emergency response, public education initiatives, training initiatives, and the care and maintenance of the equipment within the fire service. It is

Finance committee  Mr. Chair, as we had indicated through our preliminary analysis, we know that if we predicate our numbers on 75% of the volunteers across this country qualifying with a 200-hour threshold, it's approximately $29 million per year.

Finance committee  Mr. Chair, I'd offer that the notion has absolutely been discussed. A variety of considerations have been discussed with the fire chiefs across Canada. What we have indicated to government is that we are committed to working with them to find the most optimum solutions so as to r

Finance committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair, and good afternoon. My name is Rob Simonds and I'm the fire chief in Saint John, New Brunswick, and the president of the Canadian Association of Fire Chiefs. I'm here to speak about a serious public safety issue in Canada. The Government of Canada can play