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Mono against Ontario Fire College closing

February 26, 2021   ·   0 Comments

By Peter Richardson, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

In January, the Provincial government announced that it would be closing Ontario Fire College (OFC) and resorting to a system of Regional Training Centres at the end of March 2021.

These training centres are for profit enterprises and are substantially more expensive than the OFC.

This then dramatically affects both the training and the budges of all fire departments, but especially the smaller volunteer departments servicing smaller municipalities like Mono.

Currently Mono is serviced by four departments, Shelburne, Rosemont, Orangeville and Caledon so this poses a major change to how the Town will pay for fire protection services.

Courses at the OFC cost $65 per registrant and that includes meals and accommodations. On top, the municipality pays a small salary for attendance.

The RTC’s, charge hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars for the same courses and do not provide meals and accommodations.

The courses are mandatory for a firefighter to qualify for certifications under the National Fire Protection Association standards. These certifications include Firefighter I and II, Rescue Technician, Fire Officer I-IV and many others. The training is done at the individual firefighters expense generally and in the case of volunteers, who have other jobs and obligations this can be onerous.

In the case of the Shelburne department, some 32 courses have been booked for the coming year, at the Gravenhurst campus. At a cost of $65 each, that is $2080.

At a cost of say $300, from an RTC the total is suddenly $9,600 and that is just a ballpark, since no costing has been done through any RTC.

For any municipality, that is a substantial budget item. In fact, to clarify it even further, The Orangeville fire chief Ron Morden and the Rosemont chief, Mike Blacklaws  have both stated that closing the OFC will likely increase the cost of training from $1,200 to $1,600 per course per firefighter, when factoring in meals and accommodations with the new fees.

As a result of this decision, which was not openly discussed with the municipalities, Council agreed Tuesday to support a motion to inform the solicitor general that they do not favour closing the Ontario Fire College Gravenhurst Campus with the provision of direct funding to cover the costs of training.

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