Greater Sudbury Fire Services has been cleared to hire four additional firefighters next year alongside two mechanical officers.
City council members greenlit the hires during 2026 budget deliberations earlier this week.
Ward 6 Coun. René Lapierre championed the business case to hire four additional firefighters, describing the effort as “a good start and would help our chief reduce overtime.”
“We’re worried about the cost, I’m also worried about staff wellness,” he said, adding that with “staff burnout, we get more overtime and it becomes a vicious cycle.”
Ward 7 Coun. Natalie Labbée narrowed in on the department’s overtime expenditures in recent years as a strike against hiring more firefighters.
Despite city council approving the hiring of four additional full-time firefighters in the city’s 2024 budget and eight additional career firefighters at the Val Therese station in 2022, Labbée noted that overtime hours have increased in subsequent years.
(The 2024 approval of four additional firefighters represented half of the eight staff recommended to help mitigate overtime costs, with the second half approved this week.)
In 2020, the city spent $1,744,082 on firefighter overtime, and this year’s projected total is more than $3 million.
“I do not have confidence in any report or anything that’s telling me that (overtime) is going to go down if we do this,” Labbée said. “It’s not going down, despite us investing in these extra positions. They’re finding a way, I don’t know what’s going on. We need to have a deeper dive into all of that.”
Labbée also suggested closing a fire hall, using Minnow Lake as an example, to save money, and requested a review of fire stations to see what the city could do.
Newly hired Chief Rob Grimwood clarified that closing a fire hall would save the city in capital costs but not overtime costs, since members would shift to other halls to meet minimum staffing requirements.
Meanwhile, the city just undertook a years-long emergency services infrastructure review which the city is chipping away at, including the consolidation of some stations alongside renovations and new builds totalling an estimated cost of $164.4 million.
Grimwood clarified that the four new hires would increase “the total pool so that we can fill those roles without going to overtime,” but he couldn’t guarantee that overtime hours would decrease.
“Firefighting is a very physically and mentally tolling line of work, and we see this, and we’re seeing increased absenteeism,” he said, noting that there are five firefighters and two captains on WSIB leave this year, plus four firefighters and one captain on modified duty.
Through October, there have been more than 4,600 hours of maternity leave clocked, where there were only 2,000 recorded last year.
It varies, he said, and the situation is dynamic, including not only absenteeism but also shift overruns during emergencies.
Even so, Grimwood pledged to present a detailed report to city council members early in the new year to more fully explain overtime hours.
The vote on adding four firefighters saw Labbée join Ward 8 Coun. Al Sizer and Ward 2 Coun. Eric Benoit in voting no, with the balance voting yes (Ward 11 Coun. Bill Leduc’s vote was not counted. He attended the meeting virtually and was not present at this point in the meeting).
Meanwhile, the addition of two mechanical officers was less contentious, with Mayor Paul Lefebvre capping council discussion by saying, “This is health and safety, this is the Ministry of Labour, this is not really, to me, really of debate.”
The two-member addition will join the department’s existing two mechanical officers in taking care of firefighter equipment, including care, maintenance and handling processes.
“That’s everything from how we select, take care of, launder and inspect on a regular basis the personal protective equipment our firefighters wear, obviously critically important,” Grimwood said.
Greater Sudbury Fire Services were recently hit with a series of Ministry of Labour orders which they’re in the process of resolving, including numerous areas mechanical officers are charged with taking care of, such as bunker gear, personal protective equipment and respiratory gear.
“These are fair orders, these are things that other fire departments in Ontario had achieved quite some time ago, incrementally,” Grimwood said.
He later added that with only two mechanical officers doing this work, “we're not even keeping up with the expected standard of care for our current equipment let alone reaching and achieving compliance with these Ministry of Labour orders.”
This is work that needs to be done, Grimwood said, and if not mechanical officers, whose wages are 65-per-cent that of first-class firefighters, they’ll have firefighters working overtime hours (150 per cent wage) doing the work.
“If we say no to this, the four we’ve just added will be taken up with that,” Fortin said, followed by an easy vote of city council members in support of hiring the two mechanical officers.
The four firefighters will be hired on June 1 to lessen the 2026 tax levy impact, but once onboarded will cost a gross $719,074 per year (net $325,074 factoring in an overtime expense reduction). The two mechanical officers will cost $247,208 per year.