by Diana Foxall
Martin has been a paramedic since the early 1970s, and marked 50 years with BCEHS as the service celebrated its 50th anniversary this year.
“In 1971, which was actually the year I graduated from high school, my uncle Ken Hennigar had bought the ambulance service in Quesnel and was operating under Quesnel Ambulance Service,” Martin said. “I started riding along with him on calls and became interested at a fairly young age.”
At that time, BC was home to a patchwork of privately run local ambulance services until the province-wide BC Ambulance Service (BCAS), as it was known then, launched on July 1, 1974.
By the time BCAS took over, Martin already had a few years of part-time work experience under his belt in Quesnel.
“That was a very welcome transition, actually, because the ambulance service in Quesnel was not making really any money – it was not a business that was able to survive as a standalone,” he said. “My uncle owned and operated a café at the Greyhound Bus Depot in Quesnel at the same time [as he ran the Quesnel Ambulance Service.]”
The advent of the provincial ambulance service introduced more formal training, which Martin had not received much of prior to 1974. He took his Emergency Medical Assistant (EMA) I course in September 1974, which is roughly equivalent to today’s emergency medical responder (EMR) license level, and then travelled to Vancouver to do his EMA II – which transitioned to today’s primary care paramedic (PCP) – course later that fall.
Martin became unit chief for the Quesnel station in 1975 at just 22-years-old.
“I was into it 100 per cent, I was really focused on that,” he said.
He quickly strengthened relationships with community organizations, and was invited to instruct the local air cadets in first aid – which ended up being a memorable experience.
“We worked together for the best part of the year, and entered a competition at the HMCS Discovery in Vancouver with this first-year group of first aid trained kids,” Martin said. “They were 13, 14, and 15-years-old, and we placed second in the province – something that we were definitely quite proud of at the time, and still are.”
After a few years as unit chief in Quesnel, Martin was looking to gain some more “accelerated” experience. The call volume in his hometown was relatively low and often involved motor vehicle accidents, so he opted to transfer to Vancouver in 1977 to learn and expand his skill set.
“I was put in a station we called G8 station at that time, which was working the Downtown Eastside,” he said. “I had the opportunity to be teamed up with a wonderful gal and a great paramedic and partner by the name of Elizabeth Larson. She was one of the first female paramedics in the province and a real pioneer to women entering the workforce as paramedics.”
The call volume in his new station was dramatically different than back home in Quesnel, and Martin recalls that even night shifts would be more or less non-stop. But in 1981, he decided to add even more to his plate by starting part-time with the Justice Institute of British Columbia (JIBC) as a contract examiner and instructor for the EMA II recertification program, which all EMA II paramedics in BC needed to complete every five years. However, as opposed to his alternating schedule on car, his work for the JIBC was exclusively day shifts.
“A good friend of mine from Alberta, he was telling me that when somebody asked him about taking a vacation, he said ‘Well, my vocation is my vacation,’” Martin said. “I found with such enjoyable work, I really enjoyed going to work every day.”
“Paramedics, they don’t treat the profession as a job. It’s something that they love to do, so it’s their life.”
In 1983, the unit chief in Nakusp had taken a secondment with the JIBC. By then, Martin had bought a home in Mission and was commuting to Vancouver every day, so he took the opportunity to transfer to Nakusp as its temporary unit chief. While he was there, he taught the EMA I course in communities throughout the West Kootenays, including Edgewood, New Denver, and Slocan.
“Terry Reid was my supervisor or regional manager at that time, and he was very supportive of that kind of a program,” Martin said. “He would call me up at any given time and ask me if I could go to a small community and do a weekend EMA I course. He would provide the time off work for me in my station, and I would go to that community, do the EMA I course, and then return back to continue work, so to speak.”
Martin’s passion for instructing is a testament to his commitment to the profession, and many of his students are now working with BCEHS.
“It’s very heartwarming to see that they’ve carried on with that,” he said. “While I was there, we also did first aid competitions – we organized a team to go to the first aid competitions, which were in-house ambulance paramedics, part-time and full-time. That was something we did every year that I was there as well. I don’t think that’s so much a tradition anymore, but it did carry on for quite a number of years.”
When it came time for the original Nakusp unit chief to return to his position, Martin found his next adventure in the north as he became unit chief at the Dawson Creek station.
“It just recently transitioned from the fire department operating the ambulance service to [BCEHS] taking over and putting our paramedics in place,” he said. “At that time, we were working out of the fire hall alongside the firefighters, and so it was a great experience as well.”
Martin continued teaching the EMA I program in the Dawson Creek region, and became the Regional Vice President for the union, Ambulance Paramedics of BC. His work for the union took him all across the north in the two years he was there: to Atlin, Haida Gwaii, and many other communities in the north and northwest.
He enjoyed his time up north, but he was keeping his eye on the unit chief spot in his hometown. Martin and his wife had planned to raise their kids in Quesnel, and after their third daughter was born while the family was in Dawson Creek, he began to plan his way back down south.
“In 1987, I was looking to get back down closer to Quesnel before our kids started school. The closest I could come was actually Prince George, so in ’87, I transferred to Prince George and looked after station 535 up on the Hart Highway,” Martin said. “I thought we would be there for quite some time, however, two years later in 1989, the unit chief position in Quesnel became available.”
Martin and his family moved back to Quesnel in 1989, where he stayed for almost two decades raising his three daughters.
In 2008, he and his wife started thinking about where they wanted to retire, settling on the Okanagan. That year, he transferred to Armstrong as the station’s new unit chief, which he called a semi-retirement of sorts.
“I was now going to a smaller station, whereas in Quesnel, I had three ambulances to manage – two regular scheduled and the third one we would get up and running when we got busy,” he said, noting the Armstrong station had just one ambulance and a handful of paramedics to schedule.
With a bit of extra time on his hands, Martin decided to go back to his roots and applied to be a contract examiner for the EMA licensing branch once more. This time, he travelled around the province to conduct EMA I and EMA II exams, which he thoroughly enjoyed. After four years in Armstrong, he was at the point where he felt ready to actually retire from full-time work, and took about three months off before deciding to go back to work part-time as a paramedic in Enderby.
Come 2024, Martin began focusing his efforts on creating a new first responder program in Falkland, where he now lives. He and two other Falkland residents began coordinating to set up the Southwest Shuswap First Responders Society (SWSFRS) in April 2024, and have since seen the first group of enthusiastic volunteers complete their first responder program in December.
“Our biggest challenge at this time is the funding – we are still working at getting funding,” he said. “We are hoping to get our funding up and running by early spring, hopefully around April, and actually get boots on the ground sometime around then.”
The group will then sign a contract with BCEHS to work with the organization’s first responder program: BCEHS will dispatch the calls that SWSFRS volunteers respond to, and then SWSFRS responders will transfer the patients over to the care of BCEHS paramedics when they arrive on scene.
The creation of SWSFRS marks a pattern in Martin’s career in paramedicine: he is relentlessly enthusiastic about mentorship and providing education.
“I think my proudest achievement is to see the part-time paramedics that have started out work through the ranks, get the training, and become full-time paramedics and move on to more advanced training,” he said. “One of the fellows that I hired in Quesnel that started working for me as a part-time paramedic is now working as a critical care paramedic.”
“Some of the proudest moments have [also] been with the EMA licensing branch where I’ve had the opportunity to examine new paramedics coming into the field and see them passing, and just share with them the experience and the joy of getting their paramedic status.”
Martin recounts a story from his time in Quesnel in the mid-1990s, when he and a fairly new paramedic partner were called out west of Quesnel to respond to an imminent childbirth. Once they located the patient, who was in her car on the side of the road, Martin put his partner – who he said was in his 50s at the time and very flustered by the situation – to work.
“He did an awesome job. We delivered a healthy little girl, three months premature, and got her into the Quesnel hospital,” he said. “She survived, became a healthy young lady, and then we quite often talk about that when we get together. It was one of his most memorable calls that he did early in his career, and one of my most memorable as well, because I was able to do a bit of teaching.”
“This was one of the 13 deliveries I assisted with in my career,” he continued. “Amongst all the carnage we experience in our profession, it is so gratifying and emotionally uplifting to assist in bringing a new life into this world.”
