Residents and volunteer firefighters from across the city got together for an emotional meeting last night.
The public meeting was organized by Hoyle Community Centre members late last week after the district chief of the Connaught station Kris Ouellette, who has been a volunteer for 25 years, was fired.
In response, the volunteer firefighters at the station handed in their pagers to the city and resigned, although they later agreed to return and provide emergency coverage in the community.
District Deputy Chief of Connaught Maria Pellerin said one of the biggest issues is the recent termination of three head firefighters — two district chiefs and a district deputy chief.
“They were terminated in our eyes unjustly,” she said.
“There are issues that arose in the fire service in Timmins that have been gradually building up for the past eight months and it all culminated with the termination of these three gentlemen. We give a lot of hours of our time for nominal pay and the dedication that these gentlemen have given, we stand behind them 100 per cent. Our department stood tall and we just stand behind them.”
For the meeting, the community centre was packed with concerned residents, as well as firefighters from across the city. Timmins CAO Dave Landers was also at the head table to answer questions, with Mayor Steve Black and a number of other councillors and municipal candidates in the audience.
Pellerin was amazed at the turnout.
“Our eight guys were literally heartbroken that we had to do this, but we were not heartbroken at standing up for our chief. That was a decision that everyone made wholeheartedly, we stand behind him. We stand behind his integrity and his innocence, that goes without question. The only thing that bothered us was handing in our pagers and leaving Connaught unprotected by us,” she said.
“This is something you don’t do on a whim. We are very grateful that Mr. Landers has taken the time to come here with us because this is the first time he’s hearing what we have to say and I believe this will end positively for all the volunteers in the Timmins camp.”
Landers said the city is committed to working with all the stations.
“Moving forward, we’ll continue to meet with the Connaught volunteers and each of the other volunteer stations to talk about some of the changes that have happened and see how that is affecting their ability to offer emergency coverage throughout the community and work towards improving morale across the entire system,” he said.
Because the decision was reached Friday night, he said there isn’t a timeline for when those meetings will happen yet.
He said what those meetings look like will be up to the stations.
“I will attend meetings with them, if they’re looking for other participants, absolutely we’ll invite whoever would be most appropriate — fire chief, corporate services, mayor, whoever they believe that they might want to be talking to and we’ll try to pick up the pieces and move forward,” said Landers.
At the meeting, there were a number of questions from people in the audience.
While there are questions about how the terminations happened, because it’s a human resources matter and an appeal process is underway, the city can’t comment on it.
Having community events held by the volunteer departments put on hold by the city was another item drawing criticism.
Pellerin said the activities were put on hold several months ago.
“We’ve been trying to negotiate with Timmins fire department administration and trying to understand where this was all going,” she said.
Landers said the city has “met with the district chiefs and we put in some rules about what the city policies are that have to be followed and making sure that we have proper transparency and accountability for the funds that are flowed from the city to the volunteer stations.”
“We came to agreement with the volunteer stations on what the various activities that we could support financially would be,” he said.
