Amalgamation

[ijmorlan]

I wouldn't say the "doing the jobs of paramedics just to keep busy" is a bad thing.  In Waterloo, at least, the firefighters are often the first to arrive ahead of the ambulance and police if an emergency call goes out. As person in need of medical assistance, I'll take the first person to arrive.

Maybe we’re understaffed on ambulance and overstaffed on fire.

In any case, staffing levels should be determined by the owners, in this case the municipal governments, not by the employees’ unions. If our democratically-elected governments decide to reduce staffing in any department, then the employees there should not be able to veto that change any more than private-sector employees should be able to do so. They should expect fair treatment in a staffing-reduction situation (and indeed in any situation) but a veto is an unearned privilege.

In the public sector I would go further and suggest that the same should apply to wages. If the government tries to reduce wages too far, they’ll have trouble getting people to apply. Instead, my understanding is that whenever a firefighter job opens up it is swamped with qualified applications. Since there is no “keeping the business in business” motivation putting an upper limit on employee wage claims, and since firefighters have good PR, the wages go up and up. If a municipality wants to see if qualified people will work for them for less than neighbouring jurisdictions, why shouldn’t they be allowed to try?