At the East Sooke Volunteer Fire Department, all positions are volunteer except the fire chief position held by Nathan Pocock, and Pocock is concerned that it will be a struggle to maintain.
That's why Pocock, who works an average of 40.25 hours a week, 19.25 of which are volunteer, is hoping to move to a paid-on-call model in the future.
"I think we're seeing increasingly that with the time commitments required here, we have to have a bigger carrot," Pocock told Sooke News Mirror.
In a past interview with Black Press, Pocock mentioned it takes up to three years to fully train a volunteer firefighter and that's on average how long they stick around. Part of Pocock's position is recruiting volunteers and he said the greatest challenge is the time commitment required by volunteers.
"Even the time commitment required for myself grows every year with more and more administrative needs and everything else, which can cause a lot of burnout in our members. I have four members currently who volunteer more than 20 hours a week. So, there's definitely a big struggle in trying to keep that.
"Finding ways to keep people motivated is one of the biggest jobs as a fire chief. We've got to battle and beat everybody's hobbies. We've got to beat the TV. We've got to beat hiking. We've got to make people want to come here more than they want to do those other things."
Adding to administrative duties, in July 2024, the fire commission updated the training standard, which means safer communities but additional administrative time commitments to ensure the standards can be met.
Pocock tries to overcome recruitment challenges by maintaining a culture that keeps the camaraderie and community going, he said.
"It's about building and enticing to make people want to come do this as their hobby," he said. The team is a great group he said, and as a leader, he challenges them to learn new things because that's often a draw to the position. "We just try to keep it as fun and as welcoming as we can while maintaining the balance of the seriousness of the work we do."
The best perk of the role is the work, he added. "That's what made me fall in love with the fire service," he said. "I started as a volunteer in this department and it's extremely gratifying to give to a community in the way we do."
The approximately 150 calls they take on average a year can each look incredibly different. These include park forest fires (the department oversees 4,000 acres of park that sees close to 300,000 tourists a year), structure fires, infant respiratory arrests and car crashes.
"We had car crashes down embankments that required us to use ropes to go down the bank and extricate people from vehicles with our tools and bring them back up with ropes," Pocock said.
Pocock is passionate about what he does, but he advocates for his team, pointing to the 2023 CRD Consolidated Budget Overview of 29 fire departments.
"When they compared East Sooke, we're currently, as per call, 34 per cent below the average funding compared to 28 other departments," he said.
In other words, East Sooke fire hall does everything they do with some of the lowest costs in fire taxes; residents spend over 30 per cent less per call than residents in the other 28 departments.
Low compensation for firefighters is common across the country. A 2022 Census Report from the Canadian Association of Fire Chiefs found that 71 per cent of firefighters in Canada are volunteers.
"It's crazy. We'll pay $200 to watch a hockey game, but we expect our emergency services to be for free," Pocock said. "I think honestly most people out there don't realize that most of us are volunteers."
While he hopes paid on-call can eventually happen for the department, all he can do is suggest it, he said. That decision would have to come from the commission, a group of volunteers that oversee the department. They'd have to approve the budget, and the budget would have to be big enough for that to happen.
It's quite a different situation than the decade Pocock spent as a firefighter in Vancouver, where there were 950 staff positions all paid and 20 fire stations. "We did 70,000 calls a year, 4,000 fires a year ... pros and cons," he said.
East Sooke with its 1,700 residents, though, for him is home. It's where he grew up and he welcomed the opportunity to serve as fire chief.
Plus, the people on his team make the job amazing, he said.
"There's not a lot of people willing to step up and give that level of commitment to their community and do it with a smile on their face like the people here do. And it just makes the job."
