B.C’s fire services are having trouble recruiting and keeping volunteers who form the bulk of the province’s firefighting resources, said Stephen Gamble, the president of the Fire Chiefs Association of B.C.

Of the province’s 15,000 firefighters, 73 per cent (11,000) are designated volunteers and many of the province’s fire departments who rely on volunteers were having a hard time keeping them, said Gamble, Port Coquitlam’s fire chief, in an interview with The Vancouver Sun.

In Metro Vancouver many municipalities such as Surrey, Coquitlam, Langley and Delta rely on volunteers. Other communities such as Vancouver and those on the North Shore employ only salaried firefighters.

The association along with the Union Of B.C. Municipalities is expected to release a report on the volunteer problem in early December, said Gamble.

“The biggest thing we face is the recruitment and retention of volunteers and these are issues we’ll have to address,” he said.

The issues were raised Thursday in Ottawa when the Canadian Association of Fire Chiefs told a Commons Standing Committee on Finance that Canada’s volunteer fire service was “under considerable stress.”

According to the association the reasons ranged from the inability of volunteers finding work close to where they were needed, aging local populations, inadequate reimbursement for out-of-pocket expenses for such things as using their own vehicles to answer emergency calls, and competing family demands on their time,

The association told the committee that there should be some tax relief given volunteers to help “faltering recruitment and retention.”

Gamble said volunteers were expected to undergo a high level of training and once trained some were finding it difficult balancing their day jobs with the demands for their services as firefighters.

“At one time employers liked the idea of having volunteers on staff. But now many companies have cut staff and they might not mind them responding to two calls a week, but if it’s two calls a day they might ask the volunteers to choose between their job or their volunteering,” said Gamble.

Gamble said some of the problems of attracting volunteers could be overcome by increasing remuneration for services or by introducing a system whereby volunteers weren’t always on standby but would have designated on-call hours.

“In terms of emergency responding, the police look after police matters, the ambulance service looks after medical matters and we look after the rest,” he said.

gbellett@vancouversun.com