Shortage of encampment fire-response data sparks anger

When smoke billowed up from Mostyn Place Park along the Assiniboine River this week, firefighters raced to the scene.

The Winnipeg Fire and Paramedic Service confirmed there was a bonfire near the riverbank, but did not say if it was at an encampment.

The neighbourhood resident who called 911, however, knows it was.

“It’s just a rinse-and-repeat kind of cycle here,” said the resident, who wanted his name withheld for safety reasons.

He described the park as “essentially a sanctioned encampment site,” and said many fires and other incidents have taken place there for years.

However, there are no publicly available statistics about how many times firefighters have responded to any encampment.

When the Free Press asked how many times the WFPS has responded to calls involving encampments on an annual basis, a spokesperson said the data was “not available.”

“Capturing this data is challenging due to a number of factors, but most importantly, the outdoor locations often don’t have associated addresses,” WFPS public information officer Erin Madden said in an email.

“Often, 911 callers provide the addresses of other nearby buildings/intersections/bridges/etc. to direct crews to the encampment locations.”

The resident said he’s been repeatedly disappointed when promises to combat the problem, made by the different levels of government, haven’t panned out.

He wonders how politicians can make policy decisions for the benefit of taxpayers in the absence of fire data specific to camps.

“Until people open their eyes, until people can face the reality that we have a crisis, this is what we’re going to be doing, for years and years and years, fighting fires, chasing fires.”

Some data on WFPS calls is publicly available and updated consistently, most notably through the city’s open data catalogue, which includes call logs list. It gives details about the nature of each incident, the call time and the neighbourhood and ward where it occurred.

Nick Kasper, president of the United Fire Fighters of Winnipeg, said even when more detailed data is collected, it isn’t updated for years.

“In many, many cases, we see that those documents for the statistics that are readily available are out of date, and, given that our call volume is rising so rapidly, it makes it hard to maintain a current picture of what’s going on in our city,” he said.

Kasper said union members have reported calls to encampments have risen dramatically. In addition, the nature of the calls has become more dangerous. He said his members come across weapons, explosive material and even booby-traps at encampments.

“The department did change our response profile to those locations… if we were responding to any of those incidents that would have otherwise got a smaller contingent of apparatus, maybe one or two vehicles, we are instead responding with a full complement, up to five apparatus to ensure crew safety,” he said.

“(It) decreases the trucks that are available for other emergencies in the area and ultimately impacts our response time.”

In 2023, owing to serious safety concerns, the WFPS ended an 18-month program in which a dedicated fire prevention officer handled encampment visits.

Kasper said collecting more detailed information about calls to encampments would provide a clear picture about their effect on resources.

“When you’re talking about the hundreds of millions of dollars in public funding that’s being allocated to the public service, and when you’re talking about the trends in emergency responses… we have a responsibility to ensure that we’re delivering that in the most cost-effective and efficient manner,” he said.

Mynarski Coun. Ross Eadie said he believes some data about calls to downtown encampments was being collected at some point.

He said information should be collected about encampments across the city.

“There’s got to be some indicator in the data that they keep that means they went to an encampment,” he said.

Al Wiebe, an advocate who was homeless for 29 months, works with organizations that check on encampments and has even worked with the WFPS on their training.

He was surprised to learn encampment call data wasn’t readily available and said it would help community groups help people in need.

“I think all the outreach teams need to have that data… so they can keep closer tabs on these camps, the ones that have fires more often than others,” he said.

The information could show the cost of the problem to taxpayers and encourage housing supports, said John Giavedoni, president of the Residents of the Exchange District.

“The lack of this (data) could be political… perhaps with a little bit of work, they could have it, but I don’t know, either there’s no funding for that little bit of work, or there’s no political appetite for it.”

malak.abas@freepress.mb.ca

Malak Abas
Reporter

Malak Abas is a city reporter at the Free Press. Born and raised in Winnipeg’s North End, she led the campus paper at the University of Manitoba before joining the Free Press in 2020. Read more about Malak.

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