Hamilton fire department will soon have just two Black full-time firefighters as service struggles with lack of diversity

When Ron Summers retires at the end of this month, the number of full-time Black firefighters in the Hamilton fire department will drop from three to two.

That's two out of 468 full-time firefighters. That's about the same number of Black firefighters there has been in the department since the 1990s.

And that's a problem, says Summers, who spent a number of years as an executive member of the Hamilton Professional Firefighters Association.

It's not a good number," said Summers, who is 58 and has spent 30 years with the Hamilton fire department.

You can do all the surveys you want, it's not very hard to show the group is under-represented," Summers said. Just go look in the fire hall. It's pretty simple.

When you look at what the Black population in Hamilton is percentagewise and you look at Black firefighters percentagewise, it's astronomically low. The demographics should somewhat resemble the population."

About one in five people in Hamilton are visible minorities and about four per cent identify specifically as Black, according to the 2016 census.

When you don't have representation within certain organizations, I don't think a lot of Black men and women think they have an opportunity to get that job so they don't apply," said Summers. They don't have a relative or they don't have a friend that's within the service so they don't aspire to do that."

Hamilton Fire Chief Dave Cunliffe acknowledges that his department needs to increase the number of employees who are visible minorities.

As chief, I recognize that my fire department is not reflective of the diverse community we serve," Cunliffe said. We recognize the fact that we need to do a better job and we have work to do to have a much more diverse workforce.

I work in one of the most trusted professions in this country and to ensure we have the trust and confidence of the people we serve, I think we have to be more reflective in terms of the diversity of our workforce.

If the people that we serve see themselves in the people that are serving them, it makes them feel more trustworthy and more confident in the service we're providing," Cunliffe said.

The Hamilton fire department hasn't tracked the total number of firefighters from all visible minorities. The city has begun collecting some race-based data from employees through voluntary diversity surveys.

The lack of racialized firefighters in the city is troubling and concerning," according to Kojo Damptey, executive director of the Hamilton Centre for Civic Inclusion.

The issue has always been that certain institutions don't spend enough time to make connections with racialized or underserved or under-represented communities," Damptey said.

The second problem is at the school level," he added. Historically, Black and racialized students are not given the full opportunity to aspire to be firefighters and other professions, so that also limits Black families."

Cunliffe said the fire department recently prepared a 10-year plan for the service and one of the top objectives identified was to increase the diversity of the department's workforce.

In recent years, he said, there were targeted efforts locally and nationally designed to increase the number of female firefighters.

He said a camp was developed for young women ages 15 to 20 to provide them with exposure to the fire service as a potential career.

Hamilton hired its first two women firefighters in 2001. By 2015, there were 14 and now there are 42.

We want to take that concept we believe we've been successful with and broaden it to the various communities that make up the city," Cunliffe said.

That's all well and good, Summers said, but the time for talking has passed.

This isn't anything new for me," said Summers. I raised these issues back in the early '90s with the Hamilton fire department.

I don't want to sit around for the next few years talking about it with organized groups saying we're going to do this' or we're going to do that' without any kind of results," he said.

You've got to get out there and get your feet on the ground and come up with some concrete results."

Steve Buist is a Hamilton-based investigative reporter at The Spectator. Reach him via email: sbuist@thespec.com