What changes on 1 January 2027, and what we are building for it.
Every Ontario department files a Standard Incident Report for every emergency it attends. On 1 January 2027 the form those reports go on changes, for the first time since 2009. The first quarterly filing under it is due 30 April 2027. The Fire Marshal’s own filing route remains available and free, and a department that files that way today can keep doing so.
What changed
Sixty-three new fields →
The first revision since 2009. Most of the new fields sit in one new section.
Section D, for carbon monoxide
Thirty-three fields for CO calls in structures — source, fuel, cause, alarm, and how many people left. Over half the change is here.
Every code renumbered, and dozens deleted
The OFM published a crosswalk for most of it. The gap is what breaks a five-year trend line.
Four files, if you file electronically
Departments that export rather than type send four comma-delimited files. The routing is simple; the formatting is where files get rejected.
An error report, and six months to answer it
A confirmation report in five business days, then an error report for every incident with a problem. The deadline inside it is the one most departments miss.
We are writing the series up as we go. Everything published on SIR 2027 →
Do you need to buy anything?
No. The obligation is to file, not to own software. The Fire Marshal’s own filing route remains available and free, and a department that files that way today can keep doing so.
A department that already exports incident data from a records system will need that system updated for the new format, and that is a conversation with the vendor it already has. A department that types its reports into the Fire Marshal’s own site has nothing to buy and nothing to migrate.
What we are building
A record first, a filing second. The department writes down what happened at a call because it needs the record; the quarterly return should fall out of that, rather than being a separate job done twice a year against a deadline.
The same records answer the questions a filing never does. Response times by district, incident types year over year, what changed after a bylaw did — what a chief is asked for at budget time and currently assembles by hand.
And for a department already running its permits through FirePermit.Online, incidents beside permits: when a smoke call comes in, whether it was a burn the department approved is a question the map can answer.
What we are building is in development. There is no ship date, and nothing about it is a condition of filing in 2027.
Build it with us
We would rather build this with a few departments than for all of them. If yours is willing to file real reports through it before 2027, talk to us monthly, and tell us plainly what does not work, we want to hear from you.
What you get: it early, and a direct say in what it does. What we get is the only thing that actually de-risks a tool like this — a department filing real incidents through it before the deadline, rather than us finding out what is wrong from an error report in May 2027.
The specification
We hold the full 2027 specification in machine-readable form — every field, code and validation rule, from the OFM’s own published pack. Departments and vendors who want it can ask.