It’s two o’clock in the morning and as you groggily reach over to pick up the ringing phone, it hits you that this can’t be a welcome call.
It’s a 911 operator calling. She just got word of a structural fire at cottage country outside Flin Flon.
“I know you are in Creighton, an entirely different community in an entirely different province,” she tells you. “But your help is being requested.”
As you toss the covers aside and rub your tired eyes, you realize how little is actually known.
What is the extent of the fire? Is something more precious than property at risk? How much have the flames grown even in the short time since 911 was notified?
What would you do? Last week, the Town of Creighton found itself having to answer that question in a fraction of a moment.
They chose to respond to the garage fire at Schist Lake – only because 911 asked and only because the resources were available at that time.
To echo Creighton Mayor Bruce Fidler, Flin Flon area cottagers cannot and should not count on Creighton to respond to fires. The town makes no guarantee of an ability to respond.
Creighton’s response at Schist Lake was deliberately restrained to ensure that resources would be available should a fire also break out in the town itself.
And Mayor Fidler has said the town will recoup its costs from cottage fires by billing the relevant insurance company or, if needed, the homeowner.
As it turned out, the Schist Lake garage blaze of Nov. 4 had already been doused on scene by the time firefighters arrived. Thank goodness.
It is unusual, to say the least, that a small Saskatchewan town finds itself pondering how, or if, to respond to fires in Manitoba cottage subdivisions 20-plus minutes away.
The situation underscores the urgent need for a formal fire service agreement that will ensure firefighters are deployed to future blazes that will inevitably strike cottage country.
No deal
Creighton has decided it will not enter into such an agreement. So has Cranberry Portage. That leaves the City of Flin Flon.
Unfortunately, Flin Flon and the cottagers have been unable to reach an agreement, and the relationship between these two parties has at times been needlessly acrimonious.
It’s true, as city officials have pointed out, that some, perhaps many, cottagers are willing to pay Flin Flon the $300 a year it wants in exchange for fire protection.
But some, perhaps many, others believe that is too much money – and fear cost escalation in the coming years.
The most logical option moving forward is to have the Government of Manitoba take control. Cottagers, after all, are the responsibility of the province, to whom they pay fees in lieu of property taxes.
The lack of proper fire protection at cottage country is not so much a failure of Flin Flon or the cottagers themselves as it is a failure of the province to protect its citizens.
From the start, provincial officials should have been the ones at the negotiating table, representing their residents at cottage country and fighting for the fairest deal possible.
The province also needs to develop a democratic means for cottagers to decide whether they accept a fire service proposal – a secret mail-in ballot, ideally.
In fairness, the province is not sitting on the sidelines today. It is in fact working to help realize a deal.
But things are not moving swiftly enough.
Local Angle runs Fridays.
