DRYDEN — “There’s not many people left that have 10 years.”
Noah Freedman has been an Ontario wildland firefighter for a decade but says there aren’t many in the field with the same level of experience any more. The main reason for that, the fire crew leader and OPSEU Local 703 vice president says, is the difficulty in retaining qualified forest firefighters.
“We're having an incredibly difficult time, for a multitude of reasons, keeping people in this program, and it's not because the work is hard,” he said.
“People love this job, it's a lot of other factors.”
Those factors, he said, include issues around health and safety (including access to first aid equipment) and pay.
“I can't express how overwhelmed we are right now, just in terms of not having the resources that we need to do the task,” he said. “I was on some pretty large fires with very few people.”
Freedman said when he started, there was “roughly a full compliment of crews” in the range of about 180. “We haven’t gotten updated numbers but I’m pretty sure we’re sitting south of 140.”
“Retention is the big problem,” he said. “It really affects us safety-wise because you have less and less experienced people making critical decisions, not just with lives on the line, but critical infrastructure that we're protecting.”
“It also makes us less good at our job, less able to do what we're supposed to do, which is protect people and protect property.”
The province has said it is taking resourcing wildland firefighting seriously, saying it filled “nearly 100 additional permanent positions to support the 2025 fire season,” in a March 2025 media release, and, in October 2024, pledging — along with the federal government — $64 million towards a number of initiatives, including contracting additional aircraft, providing $5,000 in “incentive/retention payments,” and “supporting wildland firefighters and investigators with improved access to benefit entitlements and eligibility for the same presumptive benefits as municipal firefighters and fire investigators.”
Thunder Bay-Superior North MPP Lise Vaugeois has questioned the number of full-time hires. She says some of them are right-of-first-refusal contract positions and echoed Freedman’s concerns about retention.
“You could hire 1,000 new people, but you still would have a problem on the ground because you wouldn't have any experienced people to lead the crews,” she said in an interview with Newswatch in mid-June.
“Those people are not coming back.”
The province has also said it supports reclassifying fire crews as firefighters (currently, they’re officially considered resource technicians), which would grant them access to better pay among other benefits, but the government and OPSEU remain at an impasse over some details of that reclassification, namely how seniority would be managed.
“We're not compensated adequately,” Freedman said. “I mean, 10 years in, running a fire crew, I make 30 dollars an hour, which, considering how much time we are away from our families, how dangerous the work is ... it's nowhere near what a city firefighter is making.”
“That's where our people are going, generally.”
While Freedman said he genuinely loves the work, he may be “nearing the end,” himself, even though it worries him.
“As we start to leave, that experience disappears and then who's going to train the next generation?” he said. “Every year that goes by and we lose more and more experience, you have younger, more inexperienced people training the next generation.”
“That's the thing that scares all of us.”
