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Written by James Haley
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From The Editor
The Genesis Forum for Fire and Life Safety Public Educators was held recently in Toronto and is an important initiative in providing solid, national co-operation within the fire service for issues which effect all Canadians, in this case fire and life safety education. We applaud the efforts of the Council of Canadian Fire Marshals and Fire Commissioners in this endeavour. The support of so many organizations working together is a terrific step in providing the Canadian fire service with ideas and interaction for national policy development and will stand us in good stead with the various levels of government in effecting positive change (see story, page 35).
This issue also contains some new columns we are positive you will enjoy. In particular, David Sparling strikes a chord with his thoughts on the evolution of the fire service where the fire service are responding to much more than fire calls and have had to advance our specialization in training and equipment needed now to meet these commitments, such as for confined space rescue and high-angle rescue.
He suggests that smaller departments need to re-examine how to more adequately prepare for these calls, by building regional response teams, as a better way to ensure our communities are protected. It is an excellent idea, one that many jurisdictions have already implemented to handle specialized hazardous materials incidents. We need to expand on this for other challenging calls that require the more technical skills that departments may not have the resources to handle adequately on their own.
As well, retired Ontario fire chief Cyril Hare calls for mandatory sprinklers for residential homes in the wake of the devastating West Lincoln fire and Alberta Lieutenant/Paramedic Barry Bouwsema begins a new column on leadership issues.
We also include with this issue our popular foldout wall calendar with many conferences and firefighter events to be held in 2005. If we’ve missed an event you feel we should publicize, please send the details along to me and I’ll be pleased to include it in a future issue, as well as post it on our web site calendar.
Yours in fire service safety and education, Jim Haley Editor
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