Mr. Chairman, I realize that the training is in the mandate of the fire marshal's office, which is the prevention and training component of it. Mr. Menard is correct. I know, through the capital allocation, under buying fire trucks, they bring in almost all of the equipment, including scotch air packs and boots, the whole package that comes with fire fighting, particularly equipment. The responsibility of fire fighting is within the municipal arena.

More and more, we are having difficulty, not only acquiring volunteers, but it puts much pressure and demand on these volunteers. Most of them are people who work during the day. The only time they have available to participate to do their training and inspections and have meetings is in the evenings if they want to get on with a fire brigade. I know that many fire brigades are not as active as they used to be. It is getting more difficult to get more volunteers. I like the idea of volunteer fire brigades, but it is getting more difficult. It is harder to recruit volunteers. That is the issue that I am trying to get at.

I am suggesting that, perhaps MACA and the fire marshal's office should get together and develop something, a standardized training program for all communities, or even go as far as creating positions as fire chiefs so that these people can be mandated to do, not only the prevention part, but they also do house inspections and the planning of running a volunteer fire brigade. We're not going as far as saying that we want fully paid fire brigades. I know it gets very costly if you go that route. Even in tax-based municipalities, it gets quite expensive, especially in this time of restraint. Maybe we should move away from volunteers, particularly with the fire chief position. Maybe we could make it a half-time position or even full-time with a by-law officer or something. I think that whole area has to be looked at.

More and more, it is getting difficult. There are a lot of people interested in volunteering for the fire brigade, especially in the small communities. But the communities are getting larger and larger and it is getting difficult. It takes a lot of time and effort to do this type of stuff. I think the prevention part of it is the concern I have also, Mr. Chairman. There isn't enough being done at the community level. You are supposed to do house inspections, fire reports, et cetera, and I'm not too sure those kinds of reports are being done across the territories. I've taken a look when the fire marshal's office produced the statistics on the number of fires we've had in the territories. They are up. That's why I'm raising the whole concern about fire fighting at the community level.

I think more emphasis has to be put on this whole area, not only for training on fire fighting but also on prevention. Someone has to go to houses and do visual inspections so that people aren't storing paint, et cetera, in their furnace room. As a former volunteer brigade member, we noticed that people put things in weird places. They don't realize the dangers until you point it out to them. During inspections that I used to do, Mr. Chairman, we used to give reports to the private home owners, the department, the fire marshal's office, the municipality and, if it was a home owned by the Housing Corporation, we used to give them a copy so that all the deficiencies are looked after. We recommended that tenants move things out of the paths of their escape routes and so forth.

The whole area of prevention is not really being pursued at the community level and I'm starting to have more and more concern for the safety of individuals because fire prevention isn't promoted as effectively as it should be. I think the department has to revisit the whole area and take a serious look at it.

Mr. Chairman, I have other issues, but they are more about what the department is currently doing. It is more of a progress report, so I won't get involved with the issues the department is currently undertaking. I wonder if the Minister or his deputy can comment on the couple of items I just mentioned. Thank you.