The Southern Ontario Chapter of SFPE has been awarded a SILVER Chapter Excellence Award by the SFPE Board of Directors. This is our second award as a Chapter. The award recognizes the efforts of our Executive Committee and the continued support and contributions from our membership and professional community. Thank you everyone for supporting our Chapter and helping us to serve you better!

On June 4th, 2015 we hosted our 18th annual charity golf tournament and once again we chose to support the Children’s Wish Foundation.

This year’s tournament was truly a great event with nice warm sunny weather, 104 players in attendance, all 18 holes sponsored and nearly $6000 raised for Children’s Wish.

I would like to thank everyone who participated in the event, to all those who donated prizes, and to our golf committee volunteers for helping to make the event a success. A very special thank you as well to our hole sponsors (Aon, Aviva, CASA, CNA, Intact, iv3 CUS, LRI, Marsh, Northbridge, Novus, RBA, Seneca, Solidifi, Travelers, Troy, TRS, ULC, Vipond) without whom such a large donation would not be possible. The Harley/Golf ball bucket/Scotch raffle, and the subsequent auctioning of the Scotch also helped push our donation towards the $6000 mark.

Click here to see the letter of appreciation from the Children's Wish Foundation.

It has been a great pleasure to chair this event and I look forward to getting to golf in it in 2016!

Nicole Leblanc
Golf Chair

SFPE members are invited to attend a seminar series focused around some emerging issues in Fire and Life Safety in the Built Environment. The seminars, hosted by University of Waterloo Fire Safety Group and Sereca Consulting Inc., will take place from July 7th to 9th, 2015 at the Waterloo Region Emergency Services Training and Research Complex in Waterloo, ON.

The Day 1 seminars will examine perspectives into the statistical analysis of fire losses, Day 2 will involve discussion of some implications of 6-storey wood frame construction and Day 3 will explore impacts of new requirements for integration testing of life safety systems. Live burns are also planned for each day.

Click here for more information and pricing.

TORONTO, Ontario -- SFPE-SOC is very pleased to announce that we have awarded two recipients of the 2014/2015 Thomas Chiang Memorial Award. Ms. Kailee Houter and Mr. Richard Webster were both selected to receive an award of $500.00 in recognition of their efforts and achievements during the past academic year in the field of fire protection. These awards are made possible by the generous voluntary contributions of our Chapter members and is named in honour of Thomas Chiang, one of our former Chapter presidents and long-time SFPE International member, for his strong support for fire protection education. Congratulations to Kailee and Richard!

We were also pleased to recognize Mr. Matthiew Bonnin at our recent awards ceremony at our May AGM. Matthiew is the winner of the Thomas Chiang Memorial SFPE Bursary distributed by Seneca College. Congratulations Matthiew!

Thank you to all of our members and contributors towards our annual awards. With your help, we are able to support the fire protection professionals of the future!

TORONTO, Ontario -- On May 12, 2015 we held our Annual General Meeting. In this meeting we elected our Executive Committee of Officers and Member-at-Large positions for the 2015/2016 season. We are very pleased that the nominated slate for the Executive Committee was elected by the membership. We also carried a motion to update our current by-laws to change the number of Member-at-Large positions on the Executive Committee from 6 people to include anywhere from 4 to 8 people. We believe that this change will assist the Officers in conducting Chapter business and will enable us to improve the level of service that we can provide to our membership, through engaging more members of our Chapter in the Executive Committee.

SFPE International Members – Please consider participating in SFPE’s 2015 online Constitution & Bylaws revision ballot. A ballot was sent automatically to all SFPE International members of record as of the date of the ballot’s release. Voting is open between April 16th, 2015 – June 14th, 2015 at 10:00 p.m. Eastern Time in the United States.

To review a copy of the revised Constitution & Bylaws document, please click here.

To review the FAQs about the changes, please click here.

Fire and Evacuation Modelling Workshops will be hosted by Thunderhead Engineering in Toronto May 11-15, 2015. Workshops will include topics in: FDS and PyroSim, FDS/PyroSim Distance Education and Pathfinder. Please see the attached notice for more information and pricing.

The University of Waterloo Fire Safety Program has recently released their upcoming course schedule. The program is catered to recent engineering graduates and experienced architects, engineers, building consultants and regulatory officials. See the attached notice or the program website (https://uwaterloo.ca/fire-research-and-safety/fire-safety-program) for information on program offerings, course dates and schedules.

The School of Fire Protection and Seneca Fire Protection Student Association (FPSA) invites SFPE members to attend their 4th Annual Fire Protection Career Fair and Networking Dinner on Thursday, March 26th, 2015.

This day and evening will be a perfect opportunity for individuals in the fire protection / life safety industry and future graduates from Seneca’s Fire Protection Engineering Technician and Technology programs to connect, discuss industry needs, then enjoy a casual dinner.

The event will have two guest speakers:

• Gary Jarrett, Assistant Division Chief, Fire Prevention, Brampton Fire and Emergency Services, will discuss the current challenges and issues facing the fire service in areas of fire prevention, fire inspection, and current fire code changes with respect to vulnerable occupancies.
• Cathy Robertson, Captain, Fire Prevention Professional Legal Section, Fire prevention, Toronto Fire Services, will discuss the legal aspects of the fire code, and the process inspection and subsequent charges being filed.

The FIRE career fair begins at 1:00 PM until 4:00 PM.
For Career Fair information and registration please contact Scott Pugsley (Seneca College, Fire Program Industry Coordinator) at Scott.Pugsley@senecacollege.ca

The evening begins at 5:00 PM with dinner being served at 6:00 PM.
For Networking Dinner registration and information please contact the Seneca Fire Protection Student Association at FPSA@senecacollege.ca

• Registration for Industry Professionals per attendee: $60.00 (Early Bird) $75.00 (After Feb 27th)
• Seneca College Fire Protection Alumni registration per attendee: $50.00 (Early Bird) $60.00 (After Feb 27th)

Please RSVP by Friday March 13th, 2015 to fpsa@senecacollege.ca

This event is proudly brought to you by the Seneca College School of Fire Protection, Seneca Alumni, with the additional support of CFSA (Student Chapter), CFAA, CASA, SSF, OACETT and National Engineering Month.