2026 Charlottetown Municipal Election Questionnaire

No, it is not sustainable.  There is a risk of burnout when calls/year exceed 300 and the last publicly available number was 400 at Station 2 which is entirely reliant on volunteers.  We need to understand the current composition of the volunteer force (age, experience) so that we have adequate succession planning and we need to estimate attrition vs new recruitment trends so that we ensure that the volunteer force remains staffed.  We don’t want to run the risk of having a large portion of our experienced volunteer force exit all at once due to age without having people coming through the ranks to replace them.

Charlottetown’s volunteer firefighters are essential to our community, but our staffing model must evolve as the city grows. As Mayor, I will work with the Fire Chief and their Deputy to find the right balance of career and volunteer firefighters to maintain a reliable and safe response.

The Fire Underwriters Survey assessment may offer the best insight to help us make this decision. As part of being a more transparent government, I would release this report to the public before the end of the year.

My starting point (again) is:

Professional firefighters give us speed. Volunteer firefighters give us capacity.

Professional firefighters provide a guaranteed immediate response because they are already on duty. Volunteers provide enormous additional depth when an incident grows, when there are simultaneous emergencies or when a major event requires many more people.

Those roles complement one another.

I want to strengthen the professional complement without displacing volunteers. In fact, I would like to substantially grow the volunteer side as well. Within five years, I would like to see Charlottetown working toward a volunteer complement of at least 120 members, assuming the Fire Chief believes that is an appropriate and manageable complement.

Recruitment cannot begin only when we need another trained firefighter.

When I lived in Germany, I became familiar with the Jugendfeuerwehr, or youth fire brigade. We attended a few of their events. In Germany these youth organizations are connected to the volunteer fire service and provide young people with age-appropriate training, teamwork and a pathway toward eventual active service.

I would like Charlottetown to explore a Junior Firefighter or Youth Fire Brigade program of its own. The ages, training activities, supervision and safety rules should be designed by the Fire Department and appropriate provincial authorities, but I think there is considerable value in introducing young people to the fire service long before we are asking them to become adult volunteers or professionals.

That is not only recruitment. It is community involvement, practical education and succession planning for a volunteer service we want to remain strong twenty years from now.

The City should also continuously measure turnout, response times, simultaneous-call frequency, volunteer availability by time of day, recruitment, retention, training requirements and the demands being placed on both groups.

If the evidence demonstrates that we need additional guaranteed 24-hour staffing, Council should fund it.

Charlottetown’s volunteer firefighters have served this city for well over a century. Their history, dedication and commitment deserve our respect. They have played an important role in protecting Charlottetown and will continue to do so.

This should never become career firefighters against volunteer firefighters. We need enough career firefighters on duty to provide a dependable immediate response, with a strong volunteer force working alongside them and backing them up.

We should look honestly at response times, turnout, availability during the day and night, call volumes and how often more than one emergency happens at the same time. If the facts show that changes are needed, then Council has to act.

I hope that the current study underway will examine the current model and provide recommendations for the long-term sustainability of the service.

I do believe that the city has a fairly good balance right now, with additional full-time positions being added to have a fully manned vehicle at the biggest stations to ensure the good initial response time. In my experience I have seen a good turnout of volunteers and have not heard much in the way of dissatisfaction from the volunteers with how their jobs work currently. If that were to change, I would be open to doing so. I think measuring the demand would best come from looking at models of larger cities along with data previously stated collected locally. I believe it is best to plan ahead rather than plan reactively for emergency response.