Thirty-five years after a devastating fire roared through a Parliament Street rooming house two days before Christmas, Deputy Fire Chief Jim Jessop pulls up a grainy photo of the blaze on his phone.
“That is my father,” he says, pointing to the firefighter scaling the fully-engulfed building as smoke billows out.
“The picture shows exactly the conditions the firefighters met that evening … knowing that there were people in behind those windows.”
The fire would go down as one of the deadliest in Toronto’s history, a poignant memory for Jessop – who knew he wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps from as young as five or six years old.
“The people that were my heroes growing up were not on Saturday morning cartoons,” he told CTV News Toronto on Monday. “They were the firefighters on my father’s truck.”
Jessop joined Toronto Fire and after taking on leadership roles outside of the service, including as Ontario’s fire marshal, he returned to his hometown as Deputy Chief in 2015.
Last Friday, Toronto city council unanimously appointed him Chief – to replace Matthew Pegg, who retired in October after eight years at the helm – effective Jan. 2.
“If you had asked me back on May 21 of 1996, when I started at this academy, would I be the chief of the Toronto Fire Service? I never would have dreamed it,” Jessop said.
Jessop is eyeing the opportunity to champion the service’s frontline staff, with a focus on tools, training and support services.
“This job is hard, it really is – the scenes that our women and men are asked to attend, the phone calls our people take in our communications centre – and I want to make sure that they have all the supports, that they like coming to work, that they feel respected and valued.”
Jessop served as acting fire chief during the height of the pandemic, while Pegg took on the role of COVID-19 incident commander, and worked to improve equity in recruitment and promotion procedures within the service.
As Deputy Chief Jessop led the operational response to some of the worst incidents in recent years, including the fatal fires at 95 Gainsborough Rd. and1315 Neilson Rd., and the deadly crash of a Tesla into a guardrail in October.
The biggest challenge moving forward, Jessop said, will be adapting emergency responses to the complex needs of a growing city.
“Everything is being densified and going vertical,” he said. “And that affects everything from fighting fires, probably upwards of a hundred storeys in the sky, to the crane collapses we’ve had lately.”
With one month to go before he takes on the top job, Jessop says he is humbled by the role ahead – and proud of the people he will soon lead.
“To me, family is everything,” he said. “And you know, obviously, this is my second family.”