Frustrated firefighters’ union president laments staffing shortage after fatal house fire By: Malak Abas and Erik Pindera Posted: 11:14 AM CST Tuesday, Dec. 30, 2025 Last Modified: 4:56 PM CST Tuesday, Dec. 30, 2025 Updates

A local comedian killed in a Nassau Street house fire Monday afternoon is being remembered for his big heart, as the union representing city firefighters warned of further tragedies if staffing shortages are not addressed.

“It’s one thing to be in this job and witness tragic outcomes and know that you’ve done everything you could to prevent it,” United Fire Fighters of Winnipeg president Nick Kasper said Tuesday.

“Then it’s another thing when you’re arriving too late to make a difference, and you’re getting there slower than you should be, and you see these types of outcomes that you hope you could have done more to prevent.”

Winnipeg Fire Paramedic Service workers responded to the burning home at 792 Nassau St. shortly after 1 p.m. Monday, where they found 45-year-old Clayton T. Stewart. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

Three others — a man and woman in their 60s and a woman in her 30s — managed to escape. Paramedics took all three to hospital — one in unstable condition. All were treated and released.

Kasper said it took about 16 minutes for a full complement of fire trucks to arrive at the scene, twice the city’s target response time. One truck was dispatched from a station outside the neighbourhood.

”When you have apparatus arriving on scene in what is double the response time for the full complement, these are the results you get,” he said.

“You arrive on scene to a well-involved structure (fire) where you may not be able to make entry because you don’t have the appropriate crews on scene, and these are the outcomes, frankly. It’s not something we ever want to experience.”

Massive delays in response times due to high call volumes have led to situations in which crews needed elsewhere are pulled away from their stations, and then are unable to respond to calls closer to their home locations, Kasper said.

“That takes a real toll on people. They come back from whatever the other call was, knowing, if we would have been in-station, if we would have been available… we were just down the street, we could have been there quicker, and maybe we could have made a difference,” he said.

“That’s a really hard thought to take home with you at the end of your shift.”

The WFPS issued a statement Tuesday afternoon.

“The closest available units were dispatched and responded to this incident,” the unsigned statement said.

City council made a last-minute change to its 2026 budget earlier this month to hire more firefighters than initially planned.

Rather than hire 10 additional firefighters annually for four years, it will add 20 in 2026 and a plan to add 20 more in 2027 will be referred to that year’s budget. The UFFW had repeatedly called for the city to add at least 40 new firefighters in 2026.

Stewart’s neighbours said they were left shaken by the news of his death and the severity of the fire.

“I came home, I saw that it was quite bad,” said Jenei Webber, who lives next door. Her home has some water damage but she won’t have to leave.

Another neighbour, Kevin Gavin, commended the firefighters for tackling the massive blaze.

“It went up so fast, and it was so intense,” he said.

He described Stewart as a “neighbourhood watch kind of guy.”

“It breaks my heart,” he said.

Stewart, born and raised in Winnipeg, was a regular face in the city’s comedy scene.

“In Winnipeg here, everybody loved him,” said Nelson Mayer, a longtime close friend and comedian. “He’s going to be deeply missed.”

Mayer said Stewart lived with his fiancée and her parents at the Nassau Street home. He described his friend as “your typical jovial big guy with a huge heart.”

“He did a really good job of making everybody feel welcome, and he had the best laugh,” he said.

Mayer and Stewart recently began performing comedy together as The Bad Apples, a reclamation of an insult phrase that has been directed at Indigenous people, who are thought of as being “red on the outside, white on the inside.”

Mayer said Stewart learned of his Indigenous ancestry later in life and that the two were “city boys” who did not grow up in First Nations.

“We knew we weren’t Indigenous like our cousins from the rez, but we really admired that part of who we were and embraced it and wanted to learn as much about it as we can, to honour those communities,” said Mayer.

“He was truly honoured to be able to perform for the Indigenous community as often as he got to…. We really wanted to grow into something, so we could really build that up even more.”

Stewart met Mayer through his father, who ran the Indigenous Wrestling Alliance promotion. Mayer said Stewart helped promote the alliance.

Mayer went on tour with his father around 2001 and had to share a room with Stewart, and they became friends.

Later, Mayer started running an open mic comedy show and a friend of Stewart’s from acting school took him to the performance. Stewart eventually hosted the show with a “great stage presence,” as his standup career began, Stewart said.

“We just became fast friends and then we started working together and touring,” said Mayer. “We’ve been best friends for at least 20 years.”

Firefighters declared the fire under control at about 4 p.m. Monday.

Crews switched between offensive and defensive strategies to fight the fire and used a ladder truck to blast water from above, the fire department said.

Winnipeg Police Service major crimes investigators, along with the WFPS, are conducting a probe, standard procedure after fire fatalities, said WPS spokeswoman Const. Dani McKinnon.

malak.abas@freepress.mb.ca

erik.pindera@freepress.mb.ca