It was twenty years ago when Jean Carrière answered the traumatic call on Highway 101 as a young paramedic.
“It was tragic, it was very gory, I had to help extricate the person who had passed,” said Carrière, now the director of health at the Cochrane District Services Board.
To this day the road memorial is still on the side of the highway. The victim was a prominent citizen of Timmins who Carrière declined to name.
“I actually get anxiety when I drive by that section of highway,” he said in a Feb. 27 interview.
“When I drive by there and I see that memorial, I can actually remember what happened that day—the smell, the weather, the people that were on the call with me. And you have to picture—this call was twenty years ago.”
Carrière does not want to diminish the family’s grieving, but adds he experiences post-traumatic stress from the incident.
“I’m not sure that they’re reminded of the call and the tragedy that happened the same way that I’m exposed to as a first responder,” he said.
He has observed that mental health injury is a frequent cause of missed work among paramedics.
Carrière, who was chief paramedic for the CDSB before assuming his current role, would like to see legislation passed, at the municipal and provincial levels, that would time limit road memorials in the interest of first responder mental health.
While the CDSB provides access to counselling to their first responders, he sees it as a preventative measure.
“For some people, those reminders that are out in the community delay their recovery or impedes them from getting better by having that constant reminder of some of the incidents they’ve responded to,” he said.
A push to get provincial legislation passed was launched in the spring of 2023 led by the Ontario Association of Fire Chiefs, the Association of the Municipalities of Ontario, the Association of Chiefs of Police and the Association of Paramedic Chiefs.
Following the Daily Press and other local media coverage of the initiative, Carrière said he got a lot of support from first responders.
“I have emails from staff thanking me for bringing this forward, ‘Thank you Jean for speaking on our behalf,’ — I got emails from people who were out of district who saw the articles on Facebook who said ‘I’m a firefighter in this community, thank you so much for bringing this to light and bringing this forward, we hope that you’re successful,’” he said.
After meeting with the Ministry of Transportation that year, Rob Grimwood, President of the Ontario Association of Fire Chiefs, was directed to the Highway Corridor Management Tool.
Created in 2017 to manage development and construction activities near provincial highways, Grimwood was told any first responder could also use it to alert the ministry of problematic memorials.
The ministry would then investigate and establish a timeline for its removal, reduction in size or relocation.
The benefit of a case-by-case approach is that it allows the ministry to address each memorial separately, rather than introducing a blanket policy, Grimwood told The Daily Press in a Jan. 14 interview.
However, when Carrière was subsequently asked if he found the tool useful, he hadn’t heard of it.
Members of the Ontario Association of Fire Chiefs were not informed of the tool until recently.
“The Ontario Association of Fire Chiefs provided members a communication and have provided access on the OAFC website (member’s only section) on how to report roadside memorials via the MTO reporting tool,” wrote Shaun Cameron with the Ontario Association of Fire Chiefs Jan. 31 in response to an email.
The Association of Municipalities of Ontario, Ontario Association of Chiefs of Police, and the Ontario Association of Paramedic Chiefs did not respond by deadline when asked if their membership had been made aware of the highway management reporting tool.
Reached for comment on Monday, Foleyet Fire Chief Melford Sullivan was not aware of the reporting tool but didn’t think that removing road memorials would help erase the memory of a traumatic call.
“Just the area which always has distinct features that are not removed would be a reminder itself,” he said. “I know of several areas where these memorials have been removed and have attended myself and I still have the memory,” he wrote in response to an email.
For his part, Carrière hadn’t heard of the highway corridor management tool being shared with members of the associations behind the request.
“I would like to see a dedicated platform, or that the province takes a more solid position when it comes to protecting the mental health of first responders and volunteers or laypeople who’ve responded to emergencies in their community,” he said.
His idea would include a feedback process where the complainant could be assured their request had been received and what the next steps would be.
“That could be in the form of a specific reporting structure on roadside memorials for first responders, as well as a policy or protocol on how that’s going to be disseminated,” he said.
The other shortcoming with the Ministry of Transportation’s reporting tool is that it doesn’t address road memorials in municipalities. There is one at the north end of Roy Nicholson Park in Timmins that some paramedics still avoid, he said.
“I think there’s also an important role that municipalities can play, by putting bylaws in place that protect the mental health of their first responders in that they set timelines, so that it’s clear with the public that you can put a roadside memorial in place but it will be on a timely basis, so they could have it up for— as an example—three months, and after that the memorial would have to be taken down,” said Carrière.
If piloted successfully at the municipal level, Carrière hopes it might encourage the province to adopt policies of their own.
Fortunately, the CDSB is on board with the idea.
“We did get a resolution from the CDSB that supported putting time limits and encouraging municipalities to put policies in place, so it would be good to reinvigorate that and continue that conversation,” Carrière said.