Sounding the alarm: an exploration of professionalization within the Ontario fire service focused on the issues, challenges, pressures, and opportunities for transforming a lauded public sector institution

Abstract

ABSTRACT The fire service is highly regarded by the community and is routinely recognised as a highly trusted occupation. The demands placed on the fire service have grown substantially in recent years due to neoliberal pressures, growing fiscal costs, accountability pressures, an expanding emergency response mandate, and the acquisition of additional non-emergency roles. This thesis explores the extent to which these changes are resulting in the professionalisation of the Ontario fire service. It employs historical and sociological institutionalism to examine the Ontario fire service as an institution to understand factors influencing its behaviour and shaping its change mechanisms. It uses related theoretical concepts of institutional agency, path dependence, endogenous and exogenous variables, rule makers versus rule takers, and institutional isomorphism to provide insight on how institutional change occurs or does not occur. This study comprised 24 interviews with leaders from Ontario and international fire services, the Ontario police and paramedic services, senior municipal officials, labour relations experts and higher education professors. The findings of this study suggest that the Ontario fire service may be approaching a critical juncture whereby it is forced to adapt to neoliberal pressures and pressures for occupational change to remain effective and become more professionalised, despite its entrenched nature as a long-standing hierarchically structured but non-professionalised institution. These pressures combined with growing calls for change are challenging the ingrained status quo. This study contributes to the literature on institutionalism and the professions through its exploration of an understudied institution. While the focus is the Ontario fire service, the findings may have implications for other fire services and similar institutions. It finds tensions between pressures for professionalisation on the one hand, and neoliberal fiscal pressures on the other. These complexities contribute to firefighters embodying a quasi-professional status that gains legitimacy from the ‘heroic work’ it undertakes rather than by qualifications or credentials. Furthermore, the post-pandemic workplace and a newer generation of workers are producing institutional pressures that can potentially shift the entrenched fire service. This research sheds light on the Ontario fire service through an academic lens and reveals a complex institution facing a challenging trajectory.