# "Paramedics are an essential service" Toronto Sun



## mariomike (25 Jan 2012)

Sue-Ann Levy  January 24, 2012 
TORONTO - There’s absolutely no doubt in my mind that Toronto EMS should be declared an essential service.

If the city’s firefighters and all unionized employees of the TTC are essential, it is absolutely absurd that frontline paramedics weren’t given that designation years ago.

It’s ironic, in fact, that they have to fight to be an essential service considering a recent study by the Association of Municipal Emergency Medical Services of Ontario (AMEMSO) that found firefighters are only trained to provide “critical” time-sensitive life and death assistance with some 1% to 2% of EMS call volumes across the province.

Yet firefighters are essential — meaning they cannot strike or be locked out. In exchange, their contract can be sent to arbitration if no progress is made at the bargaining table.

TTC workers can’t strike either anymore after council made them essential last year.

But should there be a lockout on Feb. 5, Toronto’s 850 paramedics will be left to cope with a special agreement (for the duration of the lockout only) that will permit some 15% of their already strapped force to be off the job.

Level 3 paramedic Roberta Scott said they are so short-staffed, this could create a potentially dangerous situation.

She and some 200 paramedics came to City Hall Tuesday to “sound the alarm bells” — and to push for a permanent essential services designation — before something serious really happens.

But all they managed to get was a promise of a report from city staff on the pros and cons of declaring EMS essential.

“I’m disappointed ... I was really hoping they would realize the urgency,” she said. “I’ve been fighting this for 15 years.”

In a sense, they made tremendous headway Tuesday considering, save for Scott’s tremendous groundwork, they’ve been pretty silent on the issue as a group during the 13 years I’ve been at City Hall.

As Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti told his colleagues, one never hears a “peep” from paramedics and they rarely come down to City Hall (to whine like the firefighters) because “they care about their jobs.”

They should have taken a page from the firefighters’ self-promotion handbook.

Scott said paramedics are all fired up now and are really pushing for essential services designation.

Despite the handwringing from the left and some of their useful idiots in the middle, the Millerites never chose to address the issue, either, because that would have taken away a very valuable bargaining chip from the leftists’ CUPE friends.

That said, there’s no question paramedics are caught in the middle between the city and their union.

As a unit of CUPE 416, I have no doubt that they are being treated with far less respect than had they been in their own union.

* Scott said they were put into CUPE Local 416 when they were little more than glorified chauffeurs with a first aid certificate. But now the profession has “evolved” tremendously — requiring two years of college and another year of training.

“Being in this union doesn’t fit us anymore,” she said.

Forming their own union was something Scott also endeavoured to do 11 years ago. They were turned down by the Ontario Labour Relations Board.

Deputy Mayor Doug Holyday feels the timing of the paramedic request “couldn’t be worse.”

He said the CUPE 416 brass are well within their rights to negotiate the essential service designation at the bargaining table.

“For the city to give them this item for nothing makes no sense,” he said. “Why wouldn’t we try a trade off?”

But knowing the CUPE 416 brass as I do, I can pretty well predict that they will do nothing to risk losing 18% of their members (the 850 paramedics).

Scott acknowledged it is an “awkward position” to be in given the tense negotiations underway with CUPE 416 at the moment.

“We are trying to do our best with the situation we are in,” she said. “We didn’t choose to be in this local.”

http://www.torontosun.com/2012/01/24/paramedics-are-an-essential-service



* Toronto Ambulance has been in that local since it was formed in 1917. - mm

** "when they were little more than glorified chauffeurs with a first aid certificate": That is misleading. No probie was ever sent into street operations with just those qualifications.  Upon hiring, and prior to 1975, all Toronto emergency services recruits were trained at the downtown academy. Later, we were sent to Humber College.


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## Loudubiel (17 Mar 2012)

Thank you to ALL of Canada's Paramedics! 
R/S
Allan


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