Amalgamation issues fanned the flame for Oak Bay Fire Dept. mass resignation

The majority of the Oak Bay Fire Department has resigned. (Courtesy: Carla Miner Brown)

The majority of the Oak Bay Fire Department has resigned.

The department, about 10 kilometres from the town of St. Stephen, N.B., had about 14 members on its volunteer firefighter roster and at least nine of them have put in their notice.

Since local governance reform amalgamation took effect on Jan. 1, the former local service district is now enveloped in the municipality of St. Stephen.

That means the Oak Bay Fire Department, which has served the region for more than 40 years, is now managed by the municipality -- not the province.

The municipality’s CAO put out a request for proposals from both the Oak Bay Fire Station and the St. Stephen Fire Station on how to operate under a single municipality. The two proposals differed as “parallel operating departments” and an “integrated operation.”

A January report says that the CAO has the authority to create, eliminate, merge or divide departments, provided it does not result in a decreased level of services to the community.

“Proposal that each station have a Chief that reports directly to the CAO is ill conceived. CAO office does not have capacity at this time to do day to day oversight of parallel services,” the report said.

Some members of the department say they are not happy with the change and took to social media with their resignations.

Oak Bay Chief James Brown resigned last Wednesday. He posted on Facebook saying, “it’s [sic] a sad day for myself and my fire family I had to resign as chief and firefighter for the Oak Bay Fire Department for certain reasons.”

The Mayor of the Municipality of St. Stephen, Allan MacEachern, said if they could go back, they’d do things differently.

MacEachern says he believes a communication misunderstandings led to the mass resignation.

“There is some personality conflicts there,” MacEachern said.

“And communication wasn’t great, on both ends.”

Oak Bay Capt. Bob Barrett says they just wanted to be part of the discussion.

“I would agree that communication was definitely a major issue in this -- or lack thereof,” Barrett said.

Barrett said he didn’t agree with the approach.

“Right off the bat, the CAO asking for two proposals sets you up for a confrontational approach right away -- and not a collaborative one,” he told CTV.

“In fairness to them, nobody laid a roadmap out for this,” Barrett said, in reference to the municipalities amalgamation.

Oak Bay's proposal was basically the status quo, with its members remaining unpaid volunteers.

“Once it got to the point that our fire chief found himself in an untenable position, they were making decisions over his head without consulting him at all,” Barrett said.

“They didn’t seem to have any intentions of collaborating, they wanted us to just go along with everything they wanted and be happy with that,” Barrett said.

The 16-year fire department veteran says he lost a lot of trust in the municipality’s management.

“I’m part of the community, whether I’m a firefighter or not, so I’m not washing my hands of it… it’s just left us in limbo, I guess,” Barrett said.

“It’s family and it’s part of your life, it’s engrained in you,” the fire captain said.

Barrett says the St. Stephen and Oak Bay Fire Departments have worked together for a long time and wants to be clear it’s not about them.

“This is not about St. Stephen Fire Department and their members at all. I have, we all have, the utmost respect for all of those firefighters and I think they do a great job,” Barrett said.

The mayor said, with the amalgamation, the municipality had to begin managing the Oak Bay Fire Department.

“It’s our own municipal district management, so this should be better, you don’t have to deal with Fredericton anymore, it can be a better set up and you’ve just got to look at it that way,” he said.

“If we could back up in time and not do this, or do this differently, it would definitely, I’m sure on both sides, have been done differently,” the mayor said.

The town of St. Stephen doubled in size with the municipal amalgamation, which now has about 9,000 residents.

“I’m actually sick about it, no matter how big we are, we’re still a small community,” MacEachern said.

Fire services are being maintained to the same standards by those who remain on staff and the St. Stephen fire team, but the mayor says that’s putting stress on the system.

“There’s always risk, but there’s more stress than anything, because right now we’re covering it with the remaining people,” he said.

Barrett said the majority of the resignation letters gave a final day of March 24 and are continuing services until then as they didn’t want to leave the community in the lurch.

MacEachern remains hopeful that some of the firefighters that resigned will return.

“I’m not going to say never, it just depends. I’m willing to sit down and discuss things, but you know we wanted to discuss things from the beginning,” Barrett said.

The mayor believes building that trust within the municipality will take time.

“I knew right from the start that we were going to go through some painful moves to get where we are right now, am I surprised by some? I wasn’t thinking everyone was going to jump ship,” MacEachern said.

“Did we as council, and I, take a big part in this myself personally? Did we understand that we should have communicated better, at least being supportive of their fears? I know that I didn’t do that well,” he said.

In a statement, Vicky Lutes, a representative of the department of Local Governance and Reform said the message to the fire service throughout 2022 was clear -- status quo would be what the new entities would start with on Jan. 1, 2023.

“The new local governments are responsible to deliver services to residents, including fire services. It is up to council and staff in this local government, like all others,” Lutes said.

“What changes the local government chooses to make in the future is entirely within their purview,” she said.

“That said, we are concerned with what we have been hearing and we have worked with the Office of the Fire Marshall to have him offer support to this local government to ensure a sustainable service is in place for the protection of the citizens.”