Fire office hired sex offender to meet kids

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This article was published 03/02/2016 (3004 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The Manitoba Office of the Fire Commissioner hired a registered sex offender last summer whose duties included talking to school children in up to 30 communities across Manitoba.

The man visited schools in Winnipeg and in First Nations, along with a female employee, on behalf of the Office of the Fire Commissioner. They travelled from Altona in the south, to Cross Lake in the north, as public educators for the Office of the Fire Commissioner, according to a newsletter posted on the office of the fire commissioner website.

No offences are known to have occurred.

The 30-year-old man was convicted in Brandon in 2010 for possessing child pornography.

He pleaded guilty to possessing seven child pornography videos he downloaded from the Internet, Manitoba court documents show. The videos showed children ages eight to mid-teens, including children performing sex acts. He spent 90 days in jail followed by two years’ probation, and was placed on the national sex offender registry for 10 years.

The Office of the Fire Commissioner fired the man last December after eight months’ employment.

The provincial government said it would not comment on specific personnel matters.

However in response, the province said it is committed to strengthening its current policy to ensure all departments that require child abuse checks are doing so for all employees who work with children, including students hired through STEP Services, the official student employment placement service for the Government of Manitoba.

“The province’s policy around the requirement for background/security checks (depending on the role or responsibility of the employee) has been in place for some time,” said government spokesman Shane Gibson in a prepared statement. “We are strengthening our policy to explicitly outline this approach.”

A spokesman for the Office of the Fire Commissioner made a similar commitment.

“The Office of the Fire Commissioner has now committed to ensuring those checks will be followed for any new STEP student hiring where the position puts the employee in contact with vulnerable persons such as youth or other students,” said the spokesman in a written statement.

The Canadian Centre for Child Protection wouldn’t comment on a specific case either but expressed alarm that any government agency wouldn’t perform background checks for job postings that deal with children.

“You will find people brazen enough with a background in sexual offences against children applying for jobs where they can gain access to children,” said Signy Arnason, director of cybertip.ca

“It’s imperative people do criminal record checks and child registry record checks,” said Arnason.

The child protection organization has exposed 43,000 unique images of child pornography from its tip line between 2008-2015, and 80 per cent of images involve prepubescent children, and 50 per cent show explicit sexual activity.

“When people have convictions related to child pornography, this is not an individual looking at teenagers having just slightly slipped an age category,” said Arnason. “The younger the kids, there’s an incredible likelihood the images involve sexual assault.”

bill.redekop@freepress.mb.ca

— with files from Kristin Annable