Frontenac County Council - Oct 21/26

OPSEU Agreement

At their monthly meeting on October 21, Frontenac County Council ratified a negotiated collective agreement with OPSEU Local 462, which represents Paramedics working for Frontenac Paramedic Services. The agreement extends until the beginning of 2028.

Performance Standards

Council received the Performance Standards Report from Frontenac Paramedic Services for the first nine months of 2026. The response for the most serious cases, sudden cardiac arrest (SCA) and other life threatening situations, were all short of the target response times by a narrow margin.

For example, for the SCA cases, where the target is a response within 6 minutes of receiving a call, 48% of the time, the “actual performance” was within 6 minutes 44.1% of the time.

For response level 2, where the target time is 8 minutes, 70% of the time, the service met that target 67% of the time. For response level 3, where the target was 10 minutes 75% of the time, that target was also met 67% of the time.

Mayor Judy Greenwood Speers, from Frontenac Islands, pointed out that the service on Wolfe Island is considerably slower because there are no paramedics stationed on the island, leaving crews to access the island with the unreliable ferry service.

This is dangerous for Wolfe Island residents, and has the secondary effect of making the ferry even less reliable for people travelling to the mainland for work, she said.

Rural response is always slower than urban service because of distance factors, which impacts the results.

Mayor Lichty of North Frontenac, said that he would like to see a night shift at the Robertsville ambulance station in North Frontenac, to augment the 12 hour a day service.

“We are served by the 24 hour services in Northbrook and Parham at night, and that slows responses,” he said.

Council adopted the recommended response time targets for 2027, which are the same as those in 2026.

Tiered Response

Because of changes in dispatch, and a new tiered response system that provides for slower response to non-urgent calls, to free up paramedics to respond to urgent calls, a new tiered response agreement has been negotiated between Frontenac Paramedic Services and South Frontenac Fire and Rescue.

This will alleviate pressure on South Frontenac Fire and Rescue. They will continue to respond to urgent calls. For non-urgent calls, they will now respond only in cases when Frontenac Paramedics cannot meet the new, slower response targets for the calls, which can be up to 120 minutes.

With this agreement in place, Frontenac Paramedics will now negotiate with Central and North Frontenac.

This should result in savings for the three townships burgeoning fire and rescue budgets.

K&P Trail- Not quite “To Wilbur and Beyond”

Manager of Economic Development Richard Allen, reported that the construction of the K&P Trail north of Snow Road to Wilbur Road is proceeding quickly. The project includes raising the grade of the trail through some swamp land, as well as other challenging pieces of terrain. Wilbur Road is 2km from the border between North Frontenac and Lanark County, but that final stretch runs over land whose ownership is in dispute, between a private landowner and the Mississippi Valley Conservation Authority (MVCA). Once that dispute is resolved in the courts, MVCA will be able to execute the agreement they have reached to sell the parcel to Frontenac County.

“So, it is not to Wilbur and Beyond?” Deputy Warden Ron Vandewal asked Allen.

“No, it is not,” said Allen, “fortunately that last section is mostly in pretty good shape, so it will not cost that much to bring to the standard of the rest of the trail, once we are able to acquire the land.

With this new construction, the trail will be complete from Lake Ontario to Wilbur Road.

Conservation Authority Board

Council passed a motion requesting extra representation on the two new regional Conservation Authority Boards that each have territory within Frontenac County, noting that having only one representative on the St. Lawrence Conservation Authority Board may not serve the legitimate interests of North Frontenac Township and its residents. Ten dam structures on the Mississippi River watershed are located in North Frontenac.