Pontiac MNA André Fortin has filed a petition against SOPFEU’s decision to relocate its regional director from Maniwaki to Val-d’Or. Some employees fear that the move will eventually slump Maniwaki’s economy and reduce fire protection in the area.

Fortin’s involvement is at the request of SOPFEU employees to help leverage . . .

the petition. “To us, from an economic standpoint, losing the SOPFEU in Maniwaki and having it move to Val-d’Or would be, for their region and ours, an economic blow,” said Fortin.

Fortin said that the greater concern is that this decision may lead to a mass exodus of management, resulting in the base’s demise. “What they’re really worried about is not only that one management position or where the decision-making will be made, but they’re worried about this being the first step towards the SOPFEU leaving Maniwaki and being set up in Val-d’Or altogether,” said Fortin.

Stéphane Caron, SOPFEU’s prevention and communications coordinator, dismissed the petition’s claims as a misunderstanding. “Nobody will lose their job,” he said, an intention reflected in a SOPFEU press release from last September.

Caron has also promised that nobody will be forced to relocate to Val-d’Or. “They are going to work together in the same way that we do for the rest of Quebec,” he said. “In the rest of Quebec, we have the same organization deployed from the south to the north.”

Caron argues that the petition is misled. He noted that many employees already shift between both bases depending on where they need coverage and that the reason for relocating their regional director to Val d’Or is based on the region’s more severe fires. “In the south, we have a lot of fires each year, but it’s small fires,” he said. “The amount of work that we have to do each year is more in the north.”

Fortin suspects that this shift has other intentions behind it and was planned well-ahead of time. “This just seems to be something that the bureaucrats have wanted to do for a while and now we have a minister who is from Val d’Or, so obviously he is probably very supportive of this move, but it has an impact on our region,” he said.

“If we understand that forest protection in this region is important, if we understand that both the Maniwaki and the Pontiac regions are regions that need to gain economic development opportunities, not lose them, no self-respecting government who advocates for regional development would support a plan like this.”

Despite this, it seems that SOPFEU’s Maniwaki base has not been threatened with closure, but those in support of the petition are not confident that SOPFEU will commit to their promises.

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