Fire Chief
Stephen Gamble

Steve Gamble is Fire
Chief for the sixty-four-
member Fire and Emergen-
cy Services Department in
the Lower Mainland city of
Port Coquitlam, with a pop-
ulation of about 5£,000. He
is also President of the Fire
Chiefs Association of B.C. and of the provincial
branch of the Institution of Fire Engineers, an in-
ternational organization for fire professionals. He
has had a long association with the Justice Insti-
tute, as a student, instructor, and until recently,
a member on the advisory board for the Fire and
Safety Division.

“Back when | joined the department in
1980, it was all on-the-job, in-house training. |
started off with correspondence courses from
the JI, the first one being the Company Officers
Program followed by Command Officer, Train-
ing Officer and Administration Programs. These
courses were designed to provide Company Of-
ficers with the basic skills to run their shifts and
incidents, but all ot these courses were stand-
alone programs that were not recognized outside
of the JI. Now these courses are all accredited by
IFSAC (International Fire Service Accreditation
Congress) and the ProBoard [National Board on
Fire Service Professional Qualifications]. The JI is
one of the few organizations I'm aware of that has
accreditation from both boards.

“The first course | instructed was the
second class of what was then the Recruit Fire
Fighter Training Program, now known as the Ca-
reer Fire Fighter Pre-Employment Certificate Pro-
gram. Assistant Fire Chief John Kenyon from our
department asked me to assist him with the self-

for the City of Vancouver, Glen brought fire service expertise to the table,
as well as a strong commitment to education. He held a Bachelor of Science
degree in advanced fire administration and a Master of Science degree
in emergency services and served as an adjunct professor in fire studies
at several universities throughout North America. During his time at the
JIBC, the Division made great strides in building strong relationships with
a range of stakeholders including fire departments throughout the prov-
ince, the Office of the B.C. Fire Commissioner and numerous educational
and industry partners.

A significant milestone in 2006 was the introduction of the JIBC’s
first degree—the Bachelor Degree in Fire and Safety Studies. Designed for
full-time fire service personnel, it recognizes credits from the Fire Officer
and Leadership Diploma Programs and includes online components, avail-
able on a part-time basis.

The current Director, Wayne Stevens, was a deputy fire chief with
both the Ajax, Ontario, Fire and Emergency Services and the Richmond,
B.C., Fire-Rescue. He is working on a Master of Public Administration at
the University of Western Ontario and was a Master Trainer/Facilitator
with the Ontario Fire College. He came aboard the Fire and Safety Division
in June of 2008: “First and foremost, it was the people I was meeting before
I accepted the position,” Stevens says, explaining his decision to join the
JIBC. “Recognizing how dedicated they were to helping make the Division
the number-one training institution for fire and life safety professionals.
Traditionally, the context was B.C. But now, increasingly, our focus is to
be mentioned in the same breath with Texas A&M and Oklahoma State
University programs, not only provincially, but nationally and internation-
ally.

“When I was with Richmond Fire-Rescue, I had the opportunity to
teach quite a lot, back to 2001, as an adjunct instructor at the JI. I recognized
that the Division does one thing extremely well and that’s train and educate
fire professionals. And there’s not another institution that I'm aware of in
North America with a connection to other Divisions and academies under
the same roof. That gives us a competitive advantage in terms of program-
ming. For instance, we do joint incident command programming with the
Emergency Management Division that our competitors just can't offer to
the same level. It was very exciting to see how we could actually leverage
our JI relationship. We're going to implement this in our programming to
be the provider of choice offering value for our clients’ training dollars.”

National and international clients are lured by the Division's highly
respected programming. One example of its outreach in recent years is
the opening of live burn facilities throughout the province. One of them,
reported in the summer of 2008, was a unit in Smithers that was training
First Nations volunteers, among others, as reported by the Interior News: