It’s not that he wouldn’t have done it. But Toronto Fire Chief Matthew Pegg can’t entirely mask his relief when his assistant confirms he doesn’t have to walk the Toronto Santa Claus Parade dressed as an upside-down clown.
Turns out Toronto police Chief Mark Saunders’ office was just having him on.
Even if he maintains a certain professional reserve, the head of Toronto’s fire service likes a laugh. Pegg, who swears he’s only six-foot-one but gives the impression of being much taller, walked the parade in full uniform, not a costume.
The joke about the event is a moment of levity early on Friday, Nov. 15.
By evening, the head of North America’s fourth-largest fire service wears a sober expression before TV cameras at the scene of a 16-storey apartment on Gosford Boulevard. It will take 25 trucks and 100 firefighters to extinguish the five-alarm blaze. The next morning’s news will be bleak — the death of resident Nam Tu Huy Vu on an eighth-floor balcony and hundreds of displaced residents.
Only three weeks earlier on Oct. 30, Pegg had lost his 80-year-old mother Gwen to kidney cancer.
Then in the early hours of Nov. 2, while he was still on bereavement leave, he picked up what he says “is the worst phone call that a fire chief will ever take” — two firefighters had been injured, one critically, falling from the roof of a four-alarm fire in a vacant building on Shuter Street.
Firefighters operate on “a sliding scale of risk,” Pegg says.
Link to original article on thestar.com: Toronto’s fire chief talks about the dangers of the job and importance of mental health. ‘We’re openly talking about it