On June 4th there was a well-attended All-Candidates Meeting for the 2025 Election of GFPID trustees. The meeting was held at the AGI Hall and facilitated by Gabriola Talks. The Sounder News will have a full report on the meeting, which we will link to as soon as it is published. This is part of a series of blog posts documenting the questions and responses at the ACM.
QUESTION 4
[Recording missed first part of question] …over 20 years ago, I've observed a kind of contextual shifting of how we understand the fire departments as, as the fire improvement district. And so if a citizen says, "I have a concern about how the trustees are governing," what we hear back is, "You're criticizing our firefighters. You're not behind our firefighters." I would like to know what the candidates would do to remedy that situation so that as a citizen, I can be assured that the trustees are carrying out their role, and it's an appropriate role in relation to the firefighters who deserve to be supported by a board that understands that distinction.
ANSWERS
David Chorneyko
Yeah, that's a good question, because I've seen that if you say anything about the fire department, it's immediately deflected as an attack on the firefighters themselves. And that's never, seldom, if ever, the intent of that type of thing. And it comes from a sense of defensiveness, and that's […] the way that the trustees are defending themselves. So it's a cultural thing, and the culture in this organization needs to change. And so one of the things that I would do for that is there needs to be values, mission statement and things like that, in order to ground culture in this organization. And it, like those things don't come from a place of integrity. And so there needs to, this, yeah, fire… the fire service is supposed to be an honorable and respected organization in the community, and and that stuff takes away from that. So the there needs to be a culture shift in this organization, and that's that's the tough work that needs to happen.
Chris Bowers
As I recall, when all of this stuff happened, it happened shortly after, well, after the [...] fire department decided that they were going to have a fire hall instead of a quonset hut. And right then there was disagreement about how that was going to go down. That was the first time I heard the word dysfunctional used about the fire department. Up until then, as an observer of how they worked, the fire board had all worked together very well, and then one of the people disagreed with the decision that they had all originally made together to have an architect build a fire hall instead of a quonset hut, and things kind of blew up because it was expensive. After that, it settled down a little bit. From what I recall, we hired ourselves a new fire chief, and then there was another explosion, because people were happy, happy with the fire chief that got hired, or at least some people were, I was and then, so there was all sorts of things that happened around that, and then other personnel who were accused of things and character assassinations happening all over the place, and just a whole lot of fooferaw. So it seems to me that these things have progressed. At this point I think we moved on from blaming who got to [unintelligible] as fire chief, and now there's things going on about how the fire board is functioning, and I think that just [...] keeps perpetuating, just because there's some sort of energy in the community to do that, I agree there is a difference between the fire board and the fire, the people who do the fire— [cut off by timing buzzer]
Rick Jackson
Well, through my 26 years as fire chief, I worked very hard to support the firefighters. Anybody will tell you that. And most of those years, I got along pretty well with the trustees. One notable guy came in and he was going to show us how to run this fire department. And two years later, he realized there wasn't a problem. That happened more than you think. The firefighters are respected, and what we used in the department, it used to be standard operating procedures. This is how you do stuff. Things moved on, and they realized you can't always do things exactly that way. So we had to move to operational guidelines, and that gives you a bit of a flexibility in the way it was done. I think maybe perhaps a good set of operational guidelines could be laid out for the Board of Trustees just to ensure that everybody's on the same page. There is some already, you know, the complaint process and all that used to be, gossip, gossip, gossip, you know. And then they said, no, no, if it isn't written down, it doesn't exist. And so we moved on to a situation where complaints had to be written down and, you know, and that took away a lot of the silliness that was chattered around in the background. I'm off topic a bit, but basically I feel that, I think that the board always could find a better way of working with [...] the firefighters, and you know, if I'm elected, I'll do my best to work towards that.
Oliver Bussler
The trustees and the firefighters are two very distinct organizations, in my opinion, in fact, it's fact as well. Not the firefighters—so any critique that I've leveled this evening has been towards the trustees, and I think that's where the room for improvement exists. As trustees, we have a responsibility to the firefighters to provide them with a safe environment. I think one of the reasons that you're seeing the firefighters recently having unionized themselves is because they, they may have questioned the governance that has been provided by the trustees. So I would [...] seek to improve that relationship. I know in both the governance review, as well as the Brownlee report, there were recommendations around having exit interviews that were designed by the trustees so the trustees could have more of a finger on the pulse of what's going on. [...] Why is there turnover? Why are firefighters leaving? And I know that has not been implemented, but I would seek to implement that, to again, get a better understanding of what's going on, what's the morale like.
Wayne Mercier
So when I started paying attention to the improvement district, I was struck by what seems to me to be a perception in the community that the improvement district is something like a hospital auxiliary, that works to support the work of the hospital and the doctors and all the important things they do. But that's, of course, not how it works at all. The improvement district is local government, and taxes us to pay for the fire department. They don't run the fire department. They're not involved in running the fire department. They hire a fire chief whose job it is to run the fire department, and all reports are that we have a great fire department. Hooray! That has nothing to do, almost, with the improvement district. The improvement district needs policies which require the trustees to record and report their work. There is almost none of that. I have at this point access to a full year of meetings and records of the trustees, and very little work seems to be done—certainly little work is recorded. We are told that much time is spent, but much of what is done is not written down. If that's the case, there needs to be a clear articulation of responsibilities. If I criticize Mayor Krog in Nanaimo and how the money is handled, the fire department in Nanaimo does not care, because I'm not criticizing them, I'm criticizing City Hall. This is the same. It's smaller, it's much more focused, but this is not an auxiliary, this is government. You elect us to govern. We tax you. The trustees, not me. I'm not a trustee yet, though I hope you'll vote for me. That's why we're all here. I don't care about the history of the fire hall, that was like 12 years ago. Half of the island's current population didn't live here then. We should leave that behind. It doesn't matter what kind of fire hall was built and how people felt about it. It's simply not important. What's important is that the improvement district has taken on huge responsibilities for an expansion of service and contracts with outside parties, and that none of that is being done in public with the consultative, the appropriate consultation and information of the population of voters who pay for, elect and fund the whole enterprise.
Paul Giffin
I think we all need to be clear, there's two separate roles, the fire department, the guys that come when you call for help, and the Board of Trustees. The Board of Trustees’ responsibility is the oversight of the fire department and to make sure that the fire department has what they need when they need it. I had not heard, or, I shouldn't say that—I was going to say that I had not heard any complaints from the firefighters that they haven't got what they want. But then I've never met a firefighter who's happy with what they have, and they always want more!
So we the board, do our best to supply the firefighters with the equipment that they need to do their job. So far tonight, I've heard comments about secret meetings and hidden agendas. There have been no secret meetings. What's being defined as a secret meeting? I'm going to use the example, and I'm going to speak quickly so I don't run out of time. If the city of Nanaimo [...] decides they want to change an intersection, they pass a motion, and the motion says to staff, give us a report and bring it back to us on how we're going to change this intersection. Staff will get all the information, write a report, bring it back to council. Council then decides. That's really great. It's an awesome system. Problem is we don't have any staff, so the trustees need, try to find a way to accomplish whatever the objective is, then hold a public meeting. The public meeting is for you, for the input from the community. And once we have that, we then make the decision. A perfect example of that is the long range plan.
NOTES: These transcripts were made from audio recordings. Editing is minimal, for the most part only to remove extra or repeated words or add punctuation. Any indecipherable speech is indicated as such. We have added links to referenced documents or institutions where possible. We've done our best to make this accurate; if you are aware of anything that should be corrected, please let us know through the contact form.
Anyone who had a question for the candidates submitted a slip of paper with their name on it as they registered their attendance; the names were put into a question box. A set of six names were initially drawn from the box to ask their questions. Two more names were drawn later, because time allowed for additional questions, so a total of eight questions were asked and answered. Responses were managed so that the order of response was not predictable. Both questions and answers were time-limited and the limits were actively moderated. (We commend Gabriola Talks for a very well run meeting, and thank all of the candidates for working within the constraints applied to them.)