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Category: Resources

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Republished from the original letter to the Sounder News, November 5, 2025. (The government site link has been edited to reflect an internal relocation.)

The Chief's report in the agenda package for the December GFPID general meeting notes that he is "currently reviewing the BC Employer’s Grant." 

To the Board of Trustees of the Gabriola Fire Protection Improvement District

I am writing to formally and urgently encourage the Gabriola Volunteer Fire Department (GVFD), as an improvement district, to pursue the B.C. Employer Training Grant (ETG) to fund essential firefighter training.

Despite multiple discussions with GVFD leadership over the past three years—including the former training officer, the current Fire Chief, and the Deputy Chief—the department has yet to submit an application. I firmly believe this grant is an accessible and significant opportunity that we must not overlook.

...continue reading "Letter to the Editor: BC Employer Training Grants"

Published on

Notes about accessing videos have been added to the top of the Upcoming Meetings page (under the Trustees menu item on the Gabriola Volunteer Fire Department website).

The board member in charge of updating the Trustee pages did not set the website up, and is doing their best to make things as functional as possible, but issues remain.

The main problem is in getting browsers to provide an interface that lets the viewer rewind or fast-forward. It's likely that much depends on the operating system and browser you are using and how they work with the website; we tested several options and the only one we could get to work was Firefox on a desktop. It is possible that installing media/video player extensions will accomplish the same thing on other browsers, but we didn't test that.

In Firefox on a desktop, you can open the videos in a "video player window" and access the usual playback tools for fast forwarding/rewinding/etc. The icon for accessing this is a popup that only appears when you move your mouse cursor over the video—click it to open a new window giving you the controls people are generally familiar with.

Published on

We have noted that this site has been criticized for being "incomplete" and thus giving false impressions. We are happy to include any and all information related to GFPID that is publicly available! If you think we're missing something, please use the Contact form to send us links or other forms of published material. We point to info that is fully accessible and verifiable—our goal is to collate as much information as possible in one place, because much that is relevant is fragmented and hard to find.

Yes, this site may be missing older stuff that is in fact important to know, because it was only created recently, and we do not have the capacity to do full archaeological digs into Gabriola's history in order to find documentation for  every nuance of every issue. If you think there is something from the past that is relevant, please point us to it so that information can be added.

Our policy with regards to publishing is:

  • Information must include context. If any given instance of  information is incomplete or inaccurate or contradicts other information, our policy is to point the discrepancies out and provide links to additional resources or commentary. But we can only work with what we have, so again, please do point us to any relevant published materials.
  • Information must be fully accessible. As we say elsewhere, we do not link to content on Facebook or other social media sites. Apart from structural issues relating to privacy and inaccurate information, these platforms do not permit universal access, and intermittently and unpredictably block non-users from accessing even public pages, and therefore any content referenced would not be accessible by all readers.

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Updated week of May 18th:

  • Q+A: question about mail-in or advance poll voting, questions about the proposed addition of a third Fire Chief position (2025-07 Trustees meeting).
  • Info + Resources: added David Chorneyko's letter to the editor explaining why he recommends conversion to RDN management (and announcing that he will stand as a candidate for election to the Board of Trustees for the Gabriola Fire Protection Improvement District).