Thank you for the explanation. Also, I know that discussions have already been going on in the communities. Just referring back, because we don’t have the report in front of us so we have to go by what has been quoted in some of the papers, it talks about some of our experts who have been in the field a long time, stating that in some of the cases a personal opinion is that this is going to be a fairly dry season, if not drier than last year. As I mentioned in briefings before, I’ve talked to people in the fire suppression division and they’re saying the same things.
It’s also mentioned here that usually drought cycles are, on average, about three years. It was mentioned that last year was their first year, so we can be expecting two more summers of something similar. I think that needs to be taken into account when we’re passing a budget, instead of having to come back to committee with these special warrants to get funding to fund our fire suppression crews, especially when it’s also noted that there were a lot of fires but a lot of severe fires that I think put about seven communities at risk last year.
There have been some really good questions from Members during this exchange here. I’m glad to hear that we’re going to be getting a report and maybe a debrief in March and that will be going to committee and that were about a half dozen themes that were discussed. It will be interesting to see what those are.
I know, from last year, the department was actually putting call-outs for people to come and volunteer to fight fires. You know, when we have management and guys that need to be on the fire line and yet we’re getting people off the streets to come and fight fires, there’s a significant amount of training to protect the safety of these emergency firefighters, as they’re known.
Would the department look at creating some type of emergency firefighter training at the beginning of the season and creating a database from that so that at the end of the year we’re not grabbing people off the streets and that we can have a database that we can rely on, rather than, I wouldn’t say frantically looking for people to come jump on
the fire lines, but it would be a good planning tool for another dry season that we’re looking at. Thank you, Mr. Chair.