On the day Larry Perry married his wife Helen, a fire hall stood across the street from their wedding chapel in Cornwall, Ont. As the couple nervously stood at the altar, preparing to read their vows, a siren went off next door.

Wee-ooo. Wee-ooo.

They paused, shared a glance, and waited for the noise to fade. Thinking nothing of it at the time, the lovers got on with their ceremony and returned to Perry’s hometown of Waltham, Que., to begin their married life.

But this wouldn’t be the last time a siren cut through the Perrys’ lives. Over the next five decades, fire calls would interrupt dinners, family holidays and sleep as the Waltham Fire Department’s founder and longtime chief dropped whatever he was doing to go help his neighbours.

Next month, Perry will retire after more than 50 years of service with that department.

His departure marks more than the end of a storied career. He leaves at a moment when the very future of Waltham’s department hangs in the balance.

With nine fire departments, nine sets of trucks and gear and strained budgets, MRC Pontiac municipalities are exploring amalgamation as a way to save money and improve efficiency. And Waltham, thanks to Perry’s work, is one of the last independent departments in the county.

As those conversations continue, Perry’s story becomes a window into the generation of volunteer firefighters who built their services from scratch, and the legacy they leave when their time is up.

The origin story

The Waltham Fire Department was founded on a summer’s day in 1971, when a fire broke out at the home of the family of Buddy Chassie on Waltham’s rue Principale.

Perry, who was at the other end of town, leapt into action upon seeing the flames. Within a few minutes, he and some other keeners had opened up the municipal shed and hauled two old manual pumps into the lake nearest the house.

As flames threatened the home, Perry and company lowered the hose into the water and started the pump. No water was coming out. Loose mud had completely blocked the hose. By the time they had gotten one pump unblocked, the house had been reduced to ashes and their efforts too little and too late.

The nine occupants of the home – two parents and seven children – were taken in by neighbours. Fundraisers were held to get them back on their feet. Eventually, the house was rebuilt and the family remained in the community.

The fire lit a spark in the volunteers whose efforts went in vain that day. Perry and others wanted to be better prepared the next time, so they held an informal meeting to see who might want to join an official fire brigade.

“When we see somebody’s house burning, and we’re just standing there, and we’re helpless, surely in this day and age we can do better,” Perry said of their thinking at the time. “We weren’t trained, we didn’t have any knowledge. We were just a bucket brigade.”

Despite some opposition, Perry was able to get enough interest to form a fundraising committee. They held dinners, dances and raffles until they could afford what every fledgling fire department needed: water on wheels.

Their first truck was a used five-tonne logging truck they bought in Ottawa for $2,000. Perry and his rag-tag group drove the blue and green truck home at night, parked it in a garage, and painted it red before unveiling it to the town. They used an old oil tank to hold water.

Fundraising alone, however, wasn’t enough to support the upstart department. It needed support from Waltham council. Perry said some councillors saw a fire department as a frivolous expense, but as public support for their efforts grew, council came around.

The department was officially recognized by Waltham council on June 6, 1972 – a date immortalized on the charter Perry still has pinned to the fire station’s wall.

What Perry built
What started as a rapid response to a single emergency slowly grew into a fixture in Waltham’s civic life.

The bass tournaments hosted by the Waltham Fire Department became an annual tradition, lasting over 20 years and bringing in tens of thousands of dollars.

“We really did raise quite a bit of money which helped us with the second building and the newer trucks,” Perry said of the efforts.

The tournaments, along with other fundraisers, a budget from council and a successful women’s auxiliary, allowed the department to expand its fleet. In 1981, the department purchased its first pumper. By 1992, it had its first Jaws of Life – an essential tool in many life-saving scenarios.

Perry and his team responded to some of the biggest moments in Waltham’s history. In 1994, Perry’s department helped respond to a fatal road accident near Dubeau’s Grocery on L’Isle-aux-Allumettes. A four-wheel drive truck had crossed the centre line and crushed an oncoming car, and Perry was one of the first on scene.

He heard a lone scream from the truck, where he found a woman – the accident’s only survivor. After extracting her from the vehicle, he returned to the car only to find the four occupants flattened from the impact.

“That was quite the shock, to go up to people, or what’s left of them, and verify their condition,” Perry said, adding that a few firefighters left the department following that incident.

Although the job had its tough moments, longtime firefighter Charles Ethier said Perry always remained steady.

“We went to a lot of bad scenes, but Larry was always calm,” he said.

Perry wanted to make sure his firefighters were prepared for all scenarios. When Gerald Chassie, a victim of the 1972 fire, joined the department 10 years later, he said Perry’s devotion to training his firefighters stood out.

Perry led live training sessions in burning buildings, ran first aid and first responder courses, and even offered to be the first aid dummy new recruits could train on. 

Before firefighter training courses were mandated by the province, he said Perry had ordered books from the U.S. to teach his own firefighters.

“He went above and beyond. He wanted us to be trained as well as we possibly could be. Everybody in the fire department knew how to use every piece of equipment,” Chassie said.

Through the years, Perry oversaw the acquisition of new trucks, new equipment, and the addition of a new bay to the fire hall. He became president of the Pontiac Fire Chiefs Association, and was a founding member of the Canadian Volunteer Fire Services Association.

His peers saw how much he gave to the service. Shawville-Clarendon chief Lee Laframboise, who came to know Perry through the chiefs’ association in the 90s, said Perry “lives and breathes the fire department.”

Perry had a strong department, fueled by old-fashioned volunteerism. When the province started to impose more rules and standards on rural fire departments, he saw this as oversight. As far as he was concerned, the province didn’t understand rural firefighting the way he did.

Campbell’s Bay-Litchfield chief Kevin Kluke remembers Perry being one of the first to respond when the province required basic Firefighter 1 training for chiefs.

“We know how to run our department,” he remembers Perry saying at the time.

Living life with a pager pinned to his hip didn’t come without sacrifices. Helen remembers family dinners cut short, evening walks abandoned and Christmas gifts left half-opened. She said they could never stray too far from home in case a call came in.

“You were always on guard from the back of your mind,” she said. “You’re always thinking, ‘What if there’s a call?’”

Where some saw a rude wake-up call, Perry saw a duty to his community. When someone needed help in Waltham, Larry Perry and the fire department were there.

“These guys didn’t want to be recognized as heroes, they just enjoyed helping people,” said Tom Dubreuil, who joined the department five years ago.

Age has caught up to Perry in recent years. At 77, he’s shed a few pounds, and his memory isn’t quite what it used to be. Earlier this year, Perry decided January would be his last month at the helm.

“Is there going to be a day when I arrive on a scene, and I am actually more of a problem than an asset?” he said of his reasoning.

But as Perry leaves the department he built, its survival may be at odds with a world that is forcing municipal councils to consider other options.

Department at a crossroads

Perry’s retirement comes at a time of strain for rural fire departments across Quebec. Earlier this year, public security minister Francois Bonnardel announced new fire safety policies for the province, including a rule that the fastest truck to the scene must respond to a call. The change is part of a push to improve fire service efficiency.

Julien Gagnon, head of public security at the MRC Pontiac, has been meeting with municipalities in the county to help them adapt to these changes. The numbers, he said, are hard to ignore. The MRC’s total fire protection budget has increased by 485 per cent since 2002, far outpacing population growth or municipal revenues.

Equipment costs have risen, and manpower is also strained. Of the region’s 233 firefighters, only 50 are available during weekday daytime hours. Seven of the county’s nine departments require mutual aid – support from neighbouring departments – and three rely on it 24/7.

“Everyone works out of town,” Gagnon said of Waltham and other smaller municipalities, adding that departments simply do not have the staffing needed to guarantee fastest response times.

For Gagnon, these realities point toward some sort of regionalized fire service. That could mean several larger regional departments, or a single county-wide service with sub-stations.

While many municipalities across the county have agreed to some form of shared fire services in recent years, Waltham is one of the last to the table. Since earlier this year, the municipality has been weighing whether it can continue operating its own fire department – which had a budget of $121,555 last year – or whether it would be better off sharing services with its neighbours.

Earlier this year, Waltham was presented with a fire services offer from neighbouring Mansfield-et-Pontefract, which would effectively assign Waltham’s fire protection into a neighbouring service.

Perry pushed back. These discussions threatened the existence of the department he has spent decades building, recruiting and maintaining. The province’s new rules, he said, don’t account for the value that volunteers like him provide.

“Sometimes amalgamation might make sense, but I think there’s a bigger question here. I think there’s a question of community pride and community involvement and culture, and I don’t think federal or provincial governments think in those terms.”

These conversations served as a rallying cry for Waltham firefighters. Firefighters felt as if they were not being adequately consulted, and that their contributions were being erased.

Community BBQs were held in support of the department. Recruitment efforts intensified in an effort to reverse the trend. The issue became a hot-button topic around election time in November. Jordan Evans, who ran in part on a pro–fire department platform, was elected mayor with 71 per cent of the vote.

With a new mayor whose platform priorities included keeping the fire department alive, council remains divided over Waltham’s future. Some councillors believe the status quo is still workable; others argue that sharing services may be unavoidable.

Shifting tides

Waltham is not the only Pontiac municipality to consider the question of amalgamation in recent years.

The Campbell’s Bay-Litchfield department entered a service agreement with two neighbouring municipalities in July. Chief Kevin Kluke said the agreement has boosted numbers. 

“Sometimes we don’t have our eight here. So by putting it together, we’re going to hit our eight 100 per cent of the time, and that’s the biggest problem,” he said in June.

Chief Lee Laframboise of the Shawville-Clarendon department said pressure has been building for over a decade, even if councils are slow to act. In some cases, he said, history and pride get in the way of practical decisions.

He pointed to Fort-Coulonge, a municipality of less than three square kilometres, and surrounding Mansfield as a possible pairing.

“The two fire stations aren’t even a mile apart,” Laframboise said. “But Fort-Coulonge has had a fire department forever, so there’s pride there too.”

Gagnon said this tension has deep roots. In the 1990s, Quebec ranked among the worst provinces in the country for fire safety, with high numbers of civilian and firefighter deaths. In 2001 the province created the Fire Safety Act, which required municipal councils to adopt structured fire safety plans.

“The fire department’s always operated under the terms of, ‘We will respond with what we have, when we have it. And if we don’t, well, we just don’t,’” said Gagnon. “And the government said ‘That’s enough.’”

But when councils inherited that responsibility, many hesitated to overhaul long-standing departments or challenge local traditions. “As a politician the last thing you want to do is alienate 30 or so members of a fire department,” he said.

Today, Gagnon said, the province’s priorities are blind to municipal boundaries; response time is all that matters. 

“As a resident you just don’t care where the fire truck comes from, as long as it’s got some water in it, it’s a big red fire truck and it puts water on your house as soon as possible.”

While departments around him join forces, Perry continues to fight for his department’s survival.

“We’re not going to do better under someone else’s management. I think we’re going to do better right here.” 

Retirement and the future

Waltham council struck a special meeting last week Two councillors wanted to discuss the possibility of joining the neighbouring Pontiac Ouest department, which includes Chichester, Sheenboro and L’Isle-aux-Allumettes.

For councillor Brendan Adam, the calculation is simple: We can save around $30,000 by joining Pontiac Ouest.

But for many in attendance, the fire department represents more than just a budget item. It’s a tradition, built on the backs of volunteers who consistently show up for their communities. They keep the skating rink filled and cleared for the kids. They help old ladies shovel snow off their driveway.

Tyler Rochon, who voted down a motion last month to explore mutual-aid talks with Pontiac Ouest, said the community impact of those volunteers cannot be overstated.

“It might be one of the last tethers of community spirit left here. We’re talking about grandkids and people who grew up watching their grandparents on the fire department – that’s a sense of pride for people.”

Council appears split on the issue. Some are open to the idea of amalgamation, others remain more status quo. Longtime councillor Elwood Allard said at the meeting that the department is doing just fine by itself.

“I’ll never merge with Chapeau,” he said.

But the firefighters’ message to the council was strong: We don’t want amalgamation. Perry’s potential successor, Michelle Venasse, expressed concern that the Waltham fire hall could become a ghost town under a new agreement.

Tom Dubreuil said as Waltham loses services and businesses, the fire department is one of the few things the community has left.

“We had one of the first fire houses in the Pontiac, raised by these guys here. There’s a lot of history here,” he said.

Finally, the floor belonged to Perry. While the future of his department was unclear, his message to the council was anything but. We’re fine right here.

“You asked for input – that’s the input,” he told the council, after his firefighters had made their position known.

As the council debate continues, Perry still shows up to the fire hall. Regular equipment checks are on the to-do list. Bunker suits are neatly folded. Trucks are ready to go.

On the fire station’s walls, plaques and memorabilia stand as testimony of a department built piece by piece.

One plaque, labelled The MacGyver Award, commemorates the time a few core members went to collect a new truck in Drummondville – and improvised a fix when the gas pedal failed before they’d even left town. They made it home anyway, the contraption immortalized on the plaque.

When Perry retires next month, his successor won’t have lived through the MacGyver moments. The coffee shared after tough calls. The elbow grease that fueled the department over decades.

But whether their bunker suit reads Waltham, Pontiac Ouest, or the name of a service not yet conceived, they will inherit a history shaped by volunteers who showed up for their community, led in part by Perry.

As the chief comes to grips with leaving the department, he reflects on 50 years of firefighting – a job whose cost few can truly appreciate.

“Those things that I look back on so vividly now, and were pivotal at a particular moment, they’re kind of meaningless now to other people. It’s a totally silent legacy. It’s a job that expires.”