2026 Charlottetown Municipal Election Questionnaire

The official plan needs to include a plan for fire and other emergency services both in terms of infrastructure and resources (human, trucks, equipment).  The official plan should have a mandatory review every five years and a new plan every 10 years to keep pace with the growing needs of the city including fire service.  The capacity needs to consider population, density growth and geographical footprint.  There should also be a traffic study done on major emergency routes to ensure that emergency vehicles can pass safely, especially on roads where there can be soft shoulders and ditches and minimal space to pull over.  We know that the growth in calls does not have a linear correlation with population growth as we have seen an increase of 42% in calls between 2020 and 2024 with more false alarms in newer buildings. Additionally as the population grows and ages, we will see more medical emergencies and our health care system is currently failing so an undue burden will be placed on firefighters.

Yes. As Charlottetown grows, the City will continue to regularly assess the effects on emergency demand, station coverage, equipment and staffing, and use that analysis to guide long-term capital and operating budgets.

Yes. We are at the point where building up is our remaining option. As our city grows, we need to make sure our public services can handle that growth first; this means staffing, equipment, and training.

Absolutely.

If we can forecast where people, housing and commercial development will be located five or ten years from now, we should be able to forecast the emergency-service requirements that come with them.

I would want a five- and ten-year model covering population and housing growth, call volumes, response times, simultaneous calls, station coverage, apparatus, water supply, career staffing, volunteer availability, relief requirements, retirements and recruitment.

I would also add a geographic risk inventory. A neighbourhood of houses, a high-rise building, a petroleum terminal, a propane storage facility and a large industrial development do not create identical emergency-response requirements.

Planning needs to recognize those differences.

Yes, of course. If the City knows where new homes, apartment buildings and businesses are going, it should also know what will be needed to protect them.

We should be looking at call volumes, response times, the location and type of new development, the number of firefighters available and where our stations and equipment are located. We also need to listen to the people who actually do this work.

To assist Charlottetown with this task, I understand there is a study currently underway to provide recommendations related to this question.

I would expect within this study, it will include fire department resources, water supply and water flow, response time and risk analysis.

I think it would be the responsible thing to do to get metrics for the amount of available response personnel and equipment appropriate to add yearly as the city grows, which could be easily based on the metrics available from other major cities needs and applications. I would collect data on response times to each section of town, the level of response required, incorporating; personnel, equipment/vehicle usage stats as well as gather input from members of the firehouses on what would make them more effective at their jobs. The given information could then be used with larger cities' data to make a scaling plan going forward with costs factored in.