It’s not that he wouldn’t have done it. But Toronto Fire Chief Matthew Pegg can’t entirely mask his relief when his assistant confirms he doesn’t have to walk the Toronto Santa Claus Parade dressed as an upside-down clown.

Turns out Toronto police Chief Mark Saunders’ office was just having him on.

Even if he maintains a certain professional reserve, the head of Toronto’s fire service likes a laugh. Pegg, who swears he’s only six-foot-one but gives the impression of being much taller, walked the parade in full uniform, not a costume.

The joke about the event is a moment of levity early on Friday, Nov. 15.

By evening, the head of North America’s fourth-largest fire service wears a sober expression before TV cameras at the scene of a 16-storey apartment on Gosford Boulevard. It will take 25 trucks and 100 firefighters to extinguish the five-alarm blaze. The next morning’s news will be bleak — the death of resident Nam Tu Huy Vu on an eighth-floor balcony and hundreds of displaced residents.

Only three weeks earlier on Oct. 30, Pegg had lost his 80-year-old mother Gwen to kidney cancer.

Then in the early hours of Nov. 2, while he was still on bereavement leave, he picked up what he says “is the worst phone call that a fire chief will ever take” — two firefighters had been injured, one critically, falling from the roof of a four-alarm fire in a vacant building on Shuter Street.

Firefighters operate on “a sliding scale of risk,” Pegg says.

“We will assume or absorb a considerable amount of risk if there’s a savable life. The amount of risk we will absorb is much less if there’s no human life — it’s just property. If there’s no life or property that can actually be saved we’ll incur very little risk.”

Vacant buildings pose their own risk since there is no way of knowing whether there’s a person inside, he says.

Captain James Warren and firefighter Terry Leimonis were injured as part of an early crew sent to rapidly search the Shuter Street building to ensure it was empty. To Pegg’s relief, both have since been released from hospital.

Mayor John Tory says he’s never seen a fire chief on scene as often as Pegg. Even when he doesn’t have to be there, he wants to support his men and women and the public. The mayor says even he draws some comfort from the chief’s presence, calling him “down to Earth ... totally straightforward, totally approachable.”

Pegg’s professionalism is beyond reproach, Tory says, calling the chief a methodical, data-driven leader who remains cool under pressure.

What you see is what you get with Pegg, said Toronto chief communications officer Brad Ross. He describes the fire chief as “an incredibly gifted communicator” — open, honest and reassuring behind the scenes and in front of the TV cameras.

In a city where the population is swelling and the skyline gets taller every year, Pegg carries what would be for most people, a crushing responsibility for public and firefighter safety. Pegg admits he can be brought low by fatalities and injuries to the public and the firefighting team he has sworn to protect. But in a sense, he said, that’s as it should be.

“It’s not that I’m overwhelmed. I appreciate that’s my job,” he says. “I honestly hope that I never get to the point where it becomes such a thing as an acceptable or insignificant loss.”

‘I’m supposed to be this big, tough guy that doesn’t talk about feelings’

There were 11 fire-related deaths in 2019 as of mid-December.There were 12 fire-related fatalities in 2018, down from 15 in both 2017 and 2016.

Although he has not faced any line-of-duty firefighter deaths, Pegg says he has lost dozens of people to occupational illness, including his close friend, former Ajax fire chief Mark Diotte, who died of cancer in 2014. Pegg says he is still close to Diotte’s family.

Protective firefighting equipment has improved significantly but when synthetics burn and chemicals mingle it creates a carcinogenic soup that is unavoidable for first responders.

Pegg says firefighters have traditionally dealt with trauma, sadness and stress at the bottom of a bottle of Wiser’s. If you told people you were struggling, you’d be told to suck it up, he says.

To lead the culture shift around mental health, Pegg is open about his own mental health routine that involves three or four visits a year with a psychologist. He calls it his “check up from the neck up.”

He says it was a sense of being increasingly tired that prompted him to seek counselling. Normally an early riser, he was struggling to put his feet on the floor in the morning.

“I’m supposed to be this big, tough guy that doesn’t talk about feelings a lot and I spend a lot of time (with a psychologist) answering questions: Tell me how that makes you feel; what bothers you about that and what are you doing to manage that,” Pegg says.

“In the same manner my medical doctor and the labs are really skilled in analyzing the components of my blood that I can’t see, (the psychologist) is observing my behaviour and things in me I don’t see,” he says.

“It’s like a garage. As life happens, those things get put in a box and they get put in a garage. There’s a lot of space in that garage and you can go for a long time but then, at some point, you hit a point where there’s no more space,” says Pegg, adding what the psychologist does “is he helps me unpack the old boxes and get them out of my garage.”

The nudge to go public came from mental health advocate Michael Landsberg. Pegg had seen him at an event in 2017 and was impressed. The two went on to exchange messages on social media.

Landsberg, a broadcaster who has dealt with depression, challenged the chief — asking him publicly if he really wanted to make a difference or was he just crossing off mental health on his management to-do list.

“I remember looking at it and going, ‘I can’t believe he just did that. He just called me out,’” Pegg said. But the two started working together.

They were making a video for staff when Pegg asked Landsberg if he thought it would be helpful to tell his own story.

“He looked at me and he says, ‘Are you kidding me? You have no idea the difference that would make,’” Pegg says.

The chief admits he was initially afraid the story would become about him rather than reducing the stigma of mental illness. In a videotaped interview with Landsberg, Pegg appears vaguely uncomfortable at first. But he warms to his subject.

“One of the hardest things for me as a fire chief is knowing that a firefighter is going to see things and hear things and do things and smell things that I wish they didn’t have to do. But they do,” he says.

Pegg tells recruits, “Listen to me, I’m the fire chief. If it’s OK and acceptable for me to go and get professional help to stay healthy it’s OK for you, too.”

Does it make a difference? He says he can’t quantify that.

“I can tell you when I’m in fire stations talking to people at the kitchen table, which is where you talk to people at the fire stations, we’re openly talking about mental health and I’m sitting there listening to crews talk to each other. That’s the start of a much needed and important change,” Pegg says.

The making of a fire chief

The chief, 46, grew up on his parents’ Keswick, Ont., farm near Lake Simcoe. He was only 10 when his dad died of cancer. Still, David Pegg instilled a rigorous work ethic in his son. Gwen sold the farm four years after David’s death and went to work as a medical secretary.

The loss of their father brought out his brother’s leadership qualities, says Jonathan Pegg, who works for the Ontario Fire Marshall and is a former fire chief in Innisfil, Ont.

He says his big brother’s career, which started as a volunteer firefighter in nearby Georgina, inspired his own.

“He’s always been kind of leading me. When he became a firefighter I fell in love with it from watching. But knowing he liked it interested me even more,” said Jon, who says Matt is the calmer of the two.

“I tend to be more direct and instantaneous. He’s got an incredible ability to just park it and think about things later. I’ve never seen him respond inappropriately. He’s always under control,” Jon says.

He says his brother applies a “laser focus” to being Toronto’s fire chief. But he has also given his all to other pursuits.

While still volunteering in Georgina, Matt Pegg earned a mechanic’s licence while working at Gary’s Service in Keswick. It was during that time that he also got a pilot’s licence. He says he worked on his firefighting credentials online in airport lounges while waiting to steer corporate flights back to Toronto.

The brothers share a passion for golf. The chief played competitively in the Dunlop, Golf Town and Great Lakes tours from about 2005 until 2014.

By the time he left Georgina in 1997, Pegg had been promoted to training officer. He moved to the Ajax fire department where he took the first of three deputy chief positions in his career. The second was in Brampton in 2008.

The third time, in 2013, was in Toronto. Three years later, outgoing Toronto fire chief Jim Sales called Pegg into his office and asked his deputy to fill in for him. As Pegg tells it, Sales shook his hand and walked out the door for good. The city said Sales’ resignation was “a mutual decision.” The job Pegg accepted on an interim basis became permanent in spring 2017.

Pegg met his wife, Katherine Kulson, Brampton’s chief information officer, in 2013 when they were both working on a part-time executive Masters of Management at York University’s Schulich School of Business while he was deputy chief in Brampton. It’s her first marriage, his second. She calls him a chronic overachiever.

Jon Pegg says Kulson is his brother’s rock. Their support for one another’s careers makes them a “fantastic match,” he says.

“Matt obviously is a very busy person. He’s at every fire,” Jon says. “She’s incredibly understanding.”

Unlike Toronto’s police chief who reports to a civilian police services board, the fire chief is part of the city’s management structure taking direction from council. The Fire Protection and Prevention Act is a provincial law but city council sets the levels of fire protection in accordance with that act. When there is a change to enforcement standards, the chief makes a recommendation but council decides whether to go ahead. Toronto is the only Canadian municipality with a mandated annual inspection of highrise residential buildings. That and the creation of a special fire investigation team to examine incidents where there is injury or loss of life have both come into effect during Pegg’s tenure.

‘Protected in place’ — how to fight fires in a vertical city

Toronto Fire Services responded to 132,365 emergencies in 2018 — a 9.3 per cent increase over 2017. By mid-December last year, there were 126,500 emergency events. Generally speaking the increased incident volume follows the population into high-density areas, not only downtown but places such as Yonge Street and Sheppard Avenue.

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About a third of responses in 2018, 36,415, were fires — 2,300 more than the previous year. Fifty-one per cent of fire department responses are medical emergencies. The rest are mostly rescues (remember the woman on the crane?) and car collisions. About half of the emergencies to which the fire service responds are medical situations, requiring a single truck response. About 23 per cent of all the fire trucks dispatched are racing to medical situations. Fires account for about 60 per cent.

Fire calls are overwhelmingly residential and in an increasingly vertical city that has massive implications, Pegg says.

“The demand in highrise is extraordinary. We need two-and-a-half times as many people at the scene of a highrise fire as we would at a fire in a single-family residence,” Pegg says.

But buildings are designed to limit the spread of fires outside the unit in which they originate. So when 650 Parliament St. suffered a catastrophic electrical fire in August 2018, and there was fire on every floor, firefighters left hundreds of residents in their apartments and on their balconies to be “protected in place,” Pegg said.

“Unless you have smoke or flame in your room or you have a reason to believe you’re at risk, stay where you are and if we need you to move we’ll help you move,” he explains.

“When we look at the way in which people are being hurt and killed in highrise residential fires, the majority of them are not in their suites. The majority are being hurt and killed in the hallways and the stairwells,” says the chief.

If people stay in their units, it leaves the stairwells clear for fire crews to move smoke through the hallways, into the stairwells and then vent it out through the roof.

There are, nevertheless, some alarming trends that come with Toronto’s increasingly vertical landscape — notably balcony fires.

“Last year we had 51 significant fires caused by people carelessly tossing cigarette butts. They travel laterally or down and they’re igniting fires on subsequent floors,” Pegg says.

The other fastest growing hazard category — a direct result of densification — albeit only 1.2 per cent of responses, is chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear hazards. Think hospital imaging equipment and drugs and the guy with radioactive war memorabilia in his basement.

“Nuclear/radioactive is not a big issue for us but it has to be in our skill set because no one else does it,” Pegg says.

It is an indicator of how the city’s risk profile is evolving.

“The more you pack people into an area, the more risk there is when something goes wrong,” he says.

“At any point in time we have more people underground than the population of most cities,” says Pegg, citing the subway and the PATH.

Add to that the drama of city hall and Queen’s Park and giant venues such as the Rogers Centre and Scotiabank Arena — it ranges from “exhilarating to overwhelming,” Pegg says.

Extreme weather events are another growing concern.

“In a high-density urban environment things that might not be such a big deal for other communities, things like wind, are a big deal for us. High winds wreaks havoc in the city. There are a lot of things overhead so we get overhead wires coming down and trees coming up. You get winds of that speed, it’s dislodging things off balconies. It just becomes a real hazard,” he says.

‘You are going to be accessing the most intimate private parts of people’s lives’

Managing a department with 100 workplaces, including 83 fire houses staffed 24-7 is “daunting,” he says.

“If I saw an on-duty crew every day, it would take me two years to meet everyone,” Pegg says.

What might appear to be a reserved demeanour is actually a professional requirement, says fire department director of communications Toni Vigna, the person Pegg describes as his right arm.

“Our job is to make sure we instill a sense of calm — as horrible as it is, it’s not a disaster, we have it under control,” Vigna says. “That’s how he sees his role and that of deputies’ role public facing.”

Pegg’s assistant Heather Smith has worked in several emergency services support roles. She applied for the job while on a leave for cancer treatments and was somewhat surprised the chief was willing to consider her for the position even though he knew she would need some accommodation to recover.

“He really acknowledges the differences, he’s very inclusive,” she says.

Toronto Fire Services has about 3,200 employees — about nine per cent are female. Data shows that 37 per cent of front-line fire services recruits self-identify as female, transgender, racialized, Indigenous and LGBTQS2 or as being a person with disabilities.

When Pegg addresses new fire recruits he talks about the pride and privilege of the job.

“They’re being hired into a respected, valued, well-compensated profession, something they will be proud of for the rest of their lives,” he says.

The ability to deliver that service depends entirely on unquestioned public trust.

“You are going to be accessing the most intimate private parts of people’s lives,” Pegg tells the new ranks. “You will find yourself working in people’s bedrooms unsupervised. People are going to let you go in their home. They are going to trust you with their kids. They are going to trust you with their pets. They are going to trust you with their valuables and everything they have in this life.

“If we ever got to a place where that trust was not implicit people are going to get hurt,” he says.

Pegg tries to instill in new firefighters that every one of them, himself included, stands on the shoulders of the people who came before — they all share a responsibility to leave the fire service better than they found it.

“If every one of us commit to that we’re going to be a pretty successful organization,” he says.

“If we don’t, shame on us.”

Correction - Jan. 4 2019 —This article was edited from a previous version that misstated Mark Diotte’s given name.