A Canada-wide Indigenous firefighting organization is collecting detailed data on fires in First Nations.
And the country’s National Indigenous Fire Marshal says it will serve a number of purposes to try to better fire safety in Indigenous communities.
The National Indigenous Fire Safety Council’s incident reporting system has been up and running for about five years now, Arnold Lazare told Newswatch, but they’re still advocating for more communities to submit information. The database, which “gathers, stores and analyses fire incident data from Indigenous communities,” can help in a number of ways and builds on studies the council has already done, he said.
“We want to continue the research to know where we need to do our public education,” Lazare said. “So, we've asked for communities to volunteer their statistics and we look at (things like) where the fire started, were there injuries, what was the main cause.”
“With this, we're going to, in turn, focus our public safety campaigns, our prevention campaigns on that, and it'll give us the empirical data that we can go to the funding agencies — Indigenous Services, Public Safety Canada, etc. — to obtain the funds that are necessary.”
Lazare said the organization has partnered with Statistics Canada and the National Research Council on research and data collection about fires in First Nations, and found that, depending on where you are in Canada, Indigenous people are anywhere from 10.2 times to 17 times more likely to die in a house fire.
Generally, the numbers get higher “the further north you go,” Lazare said.
Data provided to Newswatch by Ontario’s Office of the Chief Coroner showed 27 people died in 20 house fires in First Nations province-wide between 2018 and 2025. That data only included information from closed death investigations and deaths classified as “accidents” the report said, excluding those categorized as homicides or by other or undetermined causes.
Fire or smoke also had to have contributed to the cause of death for the number to be tallied, the coroner’s office said.
As for the reporting system, Lazare said any number of officials from a First Nation can report — ideally, he said it would be the fire service, but in the case where a community doesn’t have one, it can be entities like the housing department or chief and council.
He said the system is easy and intuitive to use.
One problem Lazare said they’ve found is the condition of housing in many First Nations.
“We found out that 70 per cent of the housing needed major repairs,” he said. “So, there's housing issues, there's a shortage of housing in First Nations, so you have multiple families living in a substandard home without a smoke alarm or a working smoke alarm.”
“So, when there is an issue, the fatalities or the injuries are increased.”
Lazare also pointed to a lack of firefighting capabilities in First Nations, something that plagues many in the Northwest.
The Independent First Nations Alliance and Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug filed a human rights complaint at the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal in 2025, over what they said is a consistent failure by Ottawa to properly and equitably fund on-reserve fire safety services.
The complainants have also charged that the tribunal is taking far too long to hear the case.
As far as public safety education around house fires, installing smoke alarms and knowing a home’s multiple exits is one aspect the council prioritizes, Lazare said, particularly getting that information to children.
“By reporting fire incidents, the (reporting system) will be able to analyze the causes, origins and circumstances of fires to identify risks and draw attention to areas of concern at a local, provincial and national level,” the fire safety council’s website says.
“Reporting fire incidents, and collecting this data, will also help identify trends, deficits and emerging risks as well as inform future education, infrastructure and economic planning.”