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Dufferin County Paramedic Service unveils new crest to better reflect mission

January 15, 2026   ·   0 Comments

The Dufferin County Paramedic Service has changed its crest in an effort to better represent its expanding services and mission.

The previous crest was unchanged for 20 years, according to Gary Staples, the chief paramedic at DCPS. The change was a choice based on practicality and a desire to refresh the service to the public eye.

“We had initiated a paramedic action committee and one of the things that they mentioned was that they’d like to have a more fresh look for our service,” he said. “We thought it would be a good opportunity to take a look and see what we could come up with.

“The crest was one of the first ones that we tackled. We’ve actually run out of our existing crest, so we had to make new ones anyway.”

Thanks to the dedicated work of some committee members who devoted time to redesigning the paramedic crest, three designs were created and brought forward. Ultimately, by unanimous decision, the new blue crest beat out the rest.

Sporting a new blue theme, the crest does away with the black and gold. A smooth blue background topped by blue maple leaves and a white trillium flower have taken over.

The lettering has also changed, with Staples saying it will now reflect the scope of services now offered by the DCPS.

“Previously, as we know, our crest had EMS on it as well, which was emergency medical services, but that’s not all we do now,” he said. “With the addition of our community paramedic program and our involvement in other areas such as the public access defib and our public relations that we do, we felt that we should take off the emergency part, because we do more than just emergencies.

“Everyone felt that the new design reflects the service a little better than the older one.”

The rest of the design is also designed to better reflect the region. The blue follows the official county colours, and the maple leaves, which are eight on either side, represent the eight municipalities that DCPS services.

They are Amaranth, East Garafraxa, Grand Valley, Mulmur, Mono, Melancthon, Orangeville, and Shelburne.

Rounding off the design is the star of life at centre, the globally recognized symbol for emergency medical services and personnel.

Another important focus of the change was to implement it without impacting the service financially.

“Obviously one of our conditions when we started this was that we wanted to make sure that financially, this was not going to impact our ability to deliver service,” Staples said. “There was a little bit of design work needed, but the local business we work with said that there would be no charge to actually do a final design, so it’ll just be a smooth turnover from old to new.”

The rollout will be gradual. As new uniforms are issued, the new crest will be on them. Expect to see a mixture of the old and new for a time until the switchover is completely finished.

In the near future, the DCPS is also looking at a redesign of its ambulances to improve visibility without relying on the emergency lights, which they have received feedback saying they can be blinding when idle on the side of the road.

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