Feeling the heat, firefighters call for arson task force to be reinstated By: Malak Abas Posted: 5:29 PM CDT Friday, Mar. 21, 2025

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A dog trained to sniff out arson in Winnipeg responds to more calls than its counterparts across North America and the investigation unit is egregiously understaffed, firefighters say, as they call for the defunct arson task force to be put back into action.

Scooby and his handler joined the Winnipeg Fire Paramedic Service last year. The dog was trained by the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to identify accelerants used to start fires. The government agency trained dogs for 69 jurisdictions, with Winnipeg being the only city outside the U.S.

Winnipeg has the highest call volume in the program, said United Firefighters of Winnipeg president Nick Kasper.

“It’s my understanding that we’ve already become the busiest team by overall call volume, which is, to me, just an unbelievable statistic because we’re not a large city in comparison to the jurisdictions,” he told the Free Press.

Despite escalating demand, the fire investigations unit hasn’t increased from its four staff members, Kasper said.

One investigator works on every shift and the canine is called into action across different shifts. It’s not unusual for an investigator to be tasked with determining the origin and cause of multiple fires in a day, and take on extra shifts to try to solve as many as possible.

“We cannot respond to or investigate all the calls we receive because we’re under-resourced, and it leads to the obvious issue of, if you can’t investigate the cause, you can’t place a charge, and you can’t convict anybody,” Kasper said. “It’s (not a) deterrent for arsonists.”

In 2024, there were approximately 500 fire investigations, a WFPS spokesperson said; about 30 per cent of those were deemed to be “incendiary” or deliberately ignited.

The city is in the process of adding one full-time investigator to the roster, the spokesperson said, but Kasper said the union had asked for funding for a two-person team at all times and another dog.

“(It’s) not quite where we need to be,” he said. “We’re not sure how they’re going to cover four platoons with one extra person. I think the administration is fully aware that the branch needs to expand, they haven’t been given approval by city council for those funds yet.”

Winnipeg’s fire call volume is similar to that of much larger cities such as Chicago, but those cities have more investigators, Kasper said.

“We cannot respond to or investigate all the calls we receive because we’re under-resourced, and it leads to the obvious issue of, if you can’t investigate the cause, you can’t place a charge, and you can’t convict anybody.”–United Firefighters of Winnipeg president Nick Kasper

Even Calgary, where the number of fires pales in comparison to Winnipeg, has two staff members and two dogs per shift.

The provincial Office of the Fire Commissioner has two investigators in Brandon, and one each for Winnipeg, Ste. Rose du Lac, Steinbach and La Broquerie, a provincial spokesperson said.

Kasper said the Winnipeg investigator is never sent to investigate fires in the city.

“We notify them of our stats, but they don’t actively assist,” he said.

The office held 58 fire investigations and closed 49 cases in the 2023-24 fiscal year, the provincial spokesperson said.

 

Kasper said the union wants the arson strike force, which was formed in 1999 by the provincial government to tackle a spike in fires in the city, reinstated.

At the time, it consisted of five firefighters, four police officers and three fire commissioner office investigators. It reduced arson and suspicious fires in Winnipeg by 38 per cent in its first year. Despite that success, the strike force was disbanded around 2014.

Kasper pointed out the arson problem has skyrocketed since then, but the political will and funding to bring back the task force doesn’t exist.

“We’re in an even larger crisis now, and simply because of fiscal constraint, we don’t have it,” he said. “We can’t create more positions.”

A similar task force was created in Brandon last year after an increase in suspicious fires in the western Manitoba city.

Former deputy fire commissioner Chuck Sanderson was one of the founders of the Winnipeg arson strike force. He said staff would patrol high-call areas, race to the scene of fires and try to offer rehabilitative options when people, particularly youth, were arrested.

“There was a whole range of things that we were doing, but the initial (action) was to get out in front of it, don’t wait for it to happen, get out in front of it and stop it,” he said.

He hopes some version of the arson task force that he started returns to meet the high level of need in Winnipeg.

“I’d just thought (at the time), ‘We’ve started something that will go forever.’ But of course, you get into budgets and dollars and cents and then, people start to drift,” he said. “It’s too bad.”

“…We will gladly listen to the proposal and the case behind it and see what can come of it.”–Minister of municipal relations Glen Simard

On Thursday, Glen Simard, the minister of municipal relations, said he’s open to hearing from the union about renewing the arson strike force.

“If the UFFW are signalling a need for this, and are signalling a need to review what was once done and needs to happen again… We will gladly listen to the proposal and the case behind it and see what can come of it,” he said.

The city has an inter-departmental working group that includes WFPS members, police and other city employees “very much like” the arson task force of the past, Mayor Scott Gillingham said.

He plans to meet with Kasper in the coming weeks to discuss how to ease the burden on fire investigators, among other issues.

In April of last year, the provincial government announced a $3.4-million investment to add 40 firefighters to the force. Kasper said 24 have been hired to date.

malak.abas@freepress.mb.ca