Northern Ontario’s EMS crisis, where even the ambulance is dangerous

By Jon Thompson, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, Ricochet Roy Cutfeet’s pager flickered an address into the dark. It was the middle of the night, in the middle of the winter in his fly-in hometown of Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug First Nation, and he was the only volunteer on duty to drive the vehicle they called an “ambulance.” He arrived on the scene to find a woman without a pulse. “I was caught in a puzzle,” he recalls. “I had to ask the daughter to drive so I could do CPR on her mom in the back, who died on the way to the clinic. Since then, nobody ever reached out to me to see if I needed debriefing. These are issues that happen. They just throw you on a bus with no…

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