Council approves more firefighters to combat slow response times

There’s no official contest to determine which of Halifax’s business units’ budgets is the most depressing, but if there were, Halifax Regional Fire and Emergency would be annual contenders. In more than any other business unit, Halifax’s bad decision-making is most evident in fire chief Ken Stuebing’s $98-million fire department budget.

Like they have been for the past few years, Halifax Fire’s response times are getting slower. The fire department has a goal that for every time firefighters are called to a scene, in the vast majority (90%) of cases, 14 of them will arrive within 11 minutes. Last year, they hit that mark slightly more than half the time. The success rate has fallen every year since 2021.

There are many parts to this problem—and in some respects, Halifax Fire is paying the costs of the city’s mistakes. Halifax has been growing both outward—into rural-suburban sprawl—and, more recently, upward—into skyscrapers. The sprawl of the past, combined with councillors keeping taxes low—which, in turn, leaves little spending room for more firefighters or fire stations—has meant that HRFE has to spread its limited resources over an increasingly larger area. As a result, most fire stations only have four firefighters working at a time—the four who consistently arrive to an emergency within the first 11 minutes of a call. Other crews must come from farther away. Naturally, those response times take longer. And if nothing changes, Stuebing told the Budget Committee he expects Halifax Fire’s response times will degrade another 10% over the next four years. Those minutes matter: Today’s homes, built with vinyl siding and cheaper wood, burn eight times faster than ones built 50 years ago. In 2023, it took less than an hour for the Upper Tantallon fire to spread from one home to 22 more.

Stuebing also told the committee that HRFE’s 11-minute standard is for single-family homes, not a highrise or larger-structure fire—both of which require more firefighters to douse. (It took more than 40 firefighters “the bulk of the night” to bring last weekend’s Bloomfield fire under control, district chief Robert Hebb told The Coast.) Below, on the left, you can see where Halifax Fire is failing to meet its standard for single-family homes, and on the right, you can see all of Halifax’s current and planned high-rise buildings.

In order to address this gap, the Budget Committee approved 10 new firefighters and sent an additional 10 firefighters to the budget playoffs—the Budget Adjustment List debate. If Halifax council approves all 20 firefighters, it will amount to a roughly $1-million increase to HRFE’s operating budget after four years.

Chief Stuebing told the committee they knew they were in a hole but didn’t know how bad it was until they started analyzing the data. Speaking of which, Stuebing told the committee that he was teaming up with the city’s chief operations officer, Brad Anguish, because there are other issues affecting fire response times, like car volumes and speed humps.

Because the city has no dedicated bus network, there are no dedicated travel lanes for fire trucks to use in an emergency. So they get caught in congestion like everyone else. Some European cities invest in smaller emergency vehicles and wider bike lanes so emergency vehicles can always have quick and easy access throughout the city. Paris, for example, has effectively used bike lanes to reduce fire response times. Either way, without dedicated travel space on arterials free of cars for emergency vehicles to use, there’s no guarantee that Halifax’s first responders can get to you quickly in an emergency, especially if your emergency happens at rush hour.

Speed humps are another matter. The raised deflections of asphalt are supposed to slow drivers an average of seven to 13 kilometres per hour on streets where they are used, according to the Transportation Association of Canada’s guidelines. In Halifax, they are used as “an effective tool for reducing the speed of local residential streets,” HRM staff have previously told The Coast. Ignoring until the Department of Public Works budget that speed humps probably don’t make our streets any safer (we don’t collect any data to find out), they definitely slow down emergency response times, making your emergencies more dangerous.

So, the Stuebing-Anguish duo is going to come back to council with some suggestions on how to improve this issue. It is good that now, in 2025, our mobility planning is starting to be integrated across business units. If only council had passed some sort of Integrated Mobility Plan earlier, maybe then chief Stuebing’s fire department wouldn’t be getting slower every year.

The other big-ticket item in Halifax’s firefighters budget was cancer screening for firefighters. Smoke and fire aren’t normally great for the human body, and as it turns out, all those forever chemicals we use in modern house construction aren’t so great either—and they’re causing a lot of cancer in firefighters. The city’s firefighters want to be able to send people to get screened for cancer, which is expected to cost about $200,000 a year.

Councillors don’t really want to pay for this, as building codes that allow for toxic chemicals to be used in home construction and consumer goods aren’t under municipal jurisdiction. Cancer screening—a health-care issue—also isn’t the municipality’s purview; it’s provincial. But other orders of government are letting municipal firefighters down, and the firefighters are municipal employees. What’s council gonna do? Not look after their own? This also got sent to the budget playoffs and will very likely be approved.

This article appears in Feb 1-28, 2025.