Fire departments struggle with diminished volunteers as public servants return to office

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Several fire departments in communities east of Ottawa are struggling as volunteers have reduced their hours due to the government’s new return-to-office mandate for public servants.

The fire departments of Clarence-Rockland, The Nation and Casselman rely on volunteer firefighters, some of whom are also government employees and are having to spend more time commuting to and from work instead of helping out in their communities.

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“Some of the federal employees are volunteer firefighters and help us in our daily emergencies so the fact that they’re going back to Ottawa really has an impact,” said Mario Villeneuve, the fire chief for the three municipalities.

Villeneuve said that before the federal government’s updated remote work came into effect in early September, many volunteer firefighters had arrangements with their employers to be able to check out during the workday to deal with emergencies while they were working from home. But the new return-to-office policy has made it more difficult for those volunteers to answer emergencies.

The government’s new policy requires all staff employed under the Treasury Board to work on-site a minimum of three days a week. For executives, the expectation is that they work in the office four days a week. The government first brought workers back to the office two to three days a week in December 2022 after they were sent home to work during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Paul Martel, a longtime volunteer firefighter in Clarence-Rockland who also works with the Canadian Forces fire marshal under the Department of National Defence (DND), said that when he is called to help with the fire department during a work-from-home day, he makes up the time.

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Now that public servants are expected back in the office three days a week, Martel said “the manpower is diminished.” Having to drive from his home in Bourget to the DND headquarters on Moodie Dr. takes Martel between 45 minutes to an hour and a half, which doesn’t leave much time for extracurriculars.

He said it’s frustrating as when he goes into the office, he’s often sitting on video conference calls using Teams.

“That kind of stuff can be done at home and that also leaves you, or me in my particular circumstances, the availability to help my community,” Martel said. “We’re very involved in the community with doing school visits during the day, fire drill visits. It definitely will impact our involvement in prevention activities.”

While there are a handful of full-time, paid firefighters in Clarence-Rockland, The Nation and Casselman rely entirely on volunteers, Villeneuve said, like many rural municipalities in Ontario. And while none of those volunteers have resigned yet, he said many have indicated that they won’t be able to respond to as many calls as before.

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“If they’re too far away, it’s not really worth their time to drive like 30 or 45 minutes to try to get to an incident that may be done by the time they get there,” he said. “If we have major incidents, it may take them a longer time to respond to those accidents so we therefore have to rely on mutual aid calls and rely on our neighbours to help us while our firefighters can come back from their place of work.”

While a minority of firefighters in the three east-end municipalities are federal employees, there are enough of them that it is stretching their resources thin.

“Out of 80 firefighters, if I have 10 that are federal employees, this has as an impact on our entire force,” said Villeneuve.

During the pandemic, Villeneuve said the three fire departments saw an increase in firefighters who could respond to emergencies because they were working from home. Amid the recent decrease in volunteers, Villeneuve said he’s also noticed an uptick in accidents as more people are driving in their commutes.

Nick Stocker, a volunteer firefighter in Clarence-Rockland and a public servant working for the Department of Canadian Heritage, said he thinks the government should allow those doing volunteer firefighting to go into the office only two days a week.

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He said that response times improved by at least 90 seconds in the area during the pandemic as more firefighters were available while working from home. He added that having a larger crew also meant being able to better tackle fires and emergencies.

“We’re that [last] line of defence when something goes wrong whether it’s a house fire, whether it’s a medical call, a car crash,” Stocker said. “There’s more that we can do with more people.”

Villeneuve said if the government could offer exceptions for public servants who are also volunteer firefighters it would be “a great help” as the current rules are impacting the communities’ “daily lives.”

“If they could let those individuals work from home more days a week, (it would) really help us,” he said.

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