Thorne council declined to act on a resident’s petition to restore first responder services after her family waited 45 minutes for an ambulance while their 17-month-old son suffered a seizure in April.
On Apr. 18, Thorne resident Bayley Lemay’s 17-month-old son Hank experienced a medical emergency at their home on Rte. 366. As the family waited for the ambulance to arrive, no first responders were dispatched to the scene.
Since Thorne council decided to split its fire department from Otter Lake’s in July 2025, Thorne residents have not had access to first responder services.
Prior to the split, medical first responders could be dispatched to medical emergencies to provide basic life-saving care until paramedics arrived. In rural areas, first responders often reach patients before ambulances.
Concerned about this gap in emergency care, Lemay circulated a petition asking local residents if they would consider a small increase in their tax rate to support the return of a first responder service. Lemay said she wants the municipality to either rebuild its own first responder program or restore coverage through an agreement with Otter Lake.
She received 289 responses, nearly all of them in favour of restoring first responders. 114 of these responses came from Thorne ratepayers – roughly one-fifth of the municipality’s population.
At Thorne’s May 12 monthly meeting, council voted unanimously not to move forward with the petition, after no councillor expressed interest in looking any further into the matter.
Councillor Samantha Renaud said not enough of the petition’s respondents were Thorne residents and questioned whether it accurately reflected ratepayer support.
Renaud also pointed to past issues within the former joint department as a reason why the council is proceeding cautiously with rebuilding emergency services. Council members have previously raised concerns about financial management under the former agreement with Otter Lake.
“The recovery is ongoing. This affects our taxpayers and it has only been under a year since we’ve been split,” said Renaud, who said that Thorne lost “tens of thousands of dollars” in the agreement. “Some of the same people remain in leadership roles, which raises major concerns for their accountability.”
Renaud said the municipality eventually wants to establish its own complement of first responders, but that there are several Thorne residents currently serving with Otter Lake’s fire department, making it difficult to get numbers back up in Thorne.
“Thorne has had a very clear plan in place since last year. First phase – secure our fire services, then we will expand into first response. At current, we are ahead of our expectations in both numbers and training.”
Renaud said that even if Thorne restored an agreement with Otter Lake for first responder coverage, residents would still face long ambulance wait times — a problem she said extends across the MRC. Lemay’s 45-minute wait time on Apr. 18 was nearly double the average urgent-call response time in Thorne.
“We need more ambulances and paramedics, that is the actual issue,” she said. “That should be where your fight is.”
With only four ambulances serving Pontiac’s population, that can rise well above 20,000 in the summer, Renaud said the region needs more ambulances – especially when there is a trauma call in the region that the Pontiac Hospital can’t treat.
“Our hospital doesn’t provide major trauma care. They have to go to Hull. That depletes our ambulance [complement] instantaneously,” she said.
Outaouais health authority CISSSO confirmed in a statement that there are four ambulances on the MRC Pontiac’s territory. In the eastern end of the MRC (from Bryson and east) there is one full-time on-call ambulance as well as one weekday day ambulance.
The western Pontiac sector (From Campbell’s Bay and west) is currently served by two on-call ambulances, meaning paramedics are not continuously stationed at the ambulance base and must travel to the vehicle before responding to calls.
Communications coordinator Katia Fiuza said the CISSSO conducts an annual analysis of ambulance service coverage across the entire territory. She said that in September 2025, the authority made a request to Santé Québec for ambulances in the western sector to change from on-call to a full-time staffed service in the hopes of improving response times.
While Thorne council did not vote to look into the petition any further, it did pass a motion for mayor Terry Murdock to raise the ambulance issue at the MRC Pontiac’s council of mayors.
Thorne is also planning first-aid and CPR courses in the coming months, and is encouraging residents to take the training to educate themselves on what to do in the event of an emergency.
Meanwhile, the Thorne Fire Department is continuing to recruit members with the goal of eventually being able to offer a first responder team of its own.
Lemay said she understands the ambulance shortages are a regional problem, but believes that shouldn’t stop municipalities from restoring the emergency supports they can control.
“It feels like these interpersonal issues are getting in the way,” she said.
