Among many other things, Norm is a community volunteer, junior hockey coach, a union rep, and a charity event organizer. His lifelong dedication to volunteering took him across the country, led him to coach a generation (or two) of young hockey players, and raise nearly half a million dollars for causes related to mental health in the EMS world. Today he is actively engaged in developing a mental health support network for first responders in North America focused primarily on community and exercise (called First Responders Are Human, or FRAH). And it only took him three decades, but in Early April, 2022, he was at long last formally recognized for his contributions with the Ottawa City Builder award, and then in June with the Bruno Gendron award.
I watched his speech at the first award ceremony. Standing at a podium in the City of Ottawa council chambers with his framed award certificate, Norm unfolded his written speech and proceeded to tell the crowd gathered about his volunteer days and his reasons for volunteering. “Coaching youth sports for over 30 years has been very rewarding […] It’s nice to see the young men I’ve coached later when I cross paths with them and they say ‘hey, I think you coached me a few years ago’. To see them become grown-up citizens of Ottawa is very rewarding.” One of the ultimate satisfactions for Norm is seeing his students grow, learn, and develop into strong professionals or players in their own rite. Even speaking about his hockey players, he told me: “You’re there for them. When your team wins a game, it’s all about the players”. To Norm, teaching and coaching are about the student and the player; the satisfaction comes not from being able to brag that his class / team is the best, but from the knowledge that the kids are building confidence, improving, and succeeding on their own terms.
Finally and with a sense of sincerity, he addressed the Mayor directly: “When paramedics went into those nursing homes to vaccinate the most vulnerable in our society, I saw for myself both the anxiety and the relief on the faces of our seniors; the people who served in the wars, the people who paved the way for us to be here […] To be able to put a small needle in their arm to help protect them is one of the best feelings I’ve had in my long time on the front lines”. Having been a paramedic for 35 years and having been intimately involved in EMS mental health campaigns, he would not miss this opportunity to give the mayor and city counsellors clear, first-hand visibility into the services paramedics provide and the price they pay for it.
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Paramedicine is a career that Norm came to through some of his earliest volunteer work experiences. After graduating high school, he took part in a program called “Katimavik” (meaning ‘welcome’ in the Inuk language). His group of young adults and recent high school graduates were shuffled around to various cities in Canada (Churchill, Winnipeg, Ottawa, Rockland, ON, Halifax and Dartmouth) to do volunteer work. This experience steered Norm and his fellow “Katimavikims” (as they affectionately called themselves) towards all sorts of different career paths.
Though this program, Norm was introduced to all sorts of different experiences like learning CPR and caring for people in a rehabilitation center for the grievously injured. In helping people there (an especially poignant experience of his was helping a burn victim get to various rehabilitation appointments), he realized that he was completely comfortable and not at all squeamish around people so terribly injured. With this realization and being particularly oriented towards community service, Norm was certain that EMS was the career for him.
At 20, he decided that his job was not the only thing that he wanted to do. Being the kind of guy that goes on 100km bike rides as a brief bit of ‘fun’, he had way too much energy to only have 1 job, so he started teaching labs at Algonquin college on the side. By the time that he was 23 he had taken up the position of program coordinator at Cambrian College in Sudbury (Ontario). He was the primary teacher and program coordinator at the (formerly-named) “Ambulance and Emergency Care” program for a year before returning to Ottawa where he was chosen to teach classes and labs again at Algonquin college. All told, during the first 15 years of his EMS career Norm held a second career as a college instructor and he is quick to point out that some of the most challenging and fulfilling parts of his career came from his time as a teacher.
Keeping with the theme of only one job not being enough, Norm’s current work with First Responders Are Human is not the first time that Norm’s been involved in planning a campaign and founding an organization. In 2013 Norm co-founded the Canadian Paramedic Memorial Ride and continued to serve as a director until 2020. In that time, he and his organization were able to raise around $450k to put toward commemorating Canada’s Fallen Paramedics. He also organized the “2016 Heroes are Human Capital-to-Capital Ride and Mental Health Campaign” which saw participants from Canada and the United States hop on their bikes in Ottawa and ride for two weeks and 1,600 kilometers to Washington D.C. The goal along the way was to raise awareness for first responder mental health and try to reduce the stigma. One thing that he noticed on this ride was a particular feeling of “magic” that he had not noticed before. Others would call it camaraderie, but it’s the feeling you get when you are among a group of people who all have the same goal and for the same reason as you. Norm wants to recapture that experience and make it an integral part of FRAH events. It’s that feeling that was most impactful and further, it’s that feeling of community that is most helpful to first responders trying to recover from a mental stress injury.
The First Responders Are Human organization is just the latest iteration of his volunteering, and is cobbled together from passion, hard work, and the lessons learned from decades’ worth of event organizing. For whatever reason people come to this event dubbed “Hike and Ride”, if someone leaves having enriched themselves or fulfilled their purpose, Norm will consider it a job well done. Further, it will be considered a stunning success if there are spin-offs and off-shoots of Hike and Ride, started by people who participated and positively impacted by it along the way. There are many reasons to volunteer, be it to gain experience to add to a resumé, to fill the time, to work on something about which you are passionate, because you enjoy that community or because you have a lot of extra energy that must be used elsewhere. For Norm, it started with coaching kids; at age 17 he could throw his extra energy towards a passion of his (hockey) and it ended up becoming a source for a sense of personal meaning and satisfaction. And this picture really became clear to me when at long last we sat down for a beer at a local pub to talk about volunteerism, his professional career and where things intersected. If you would ask me to describe Norm, I would tell you that he is someone driven by a sense of purpose and to expand upon that, I would say that his sense of purpose is derived from helping others and seeing them succeed.