Vancouver Island MP says classifying them differently means they could have more difficulty claiming pension improvements and early retirement
For two decades, Harold Larson helped battle wildfires across B.C. , Alberta , the U.S. and as far away as Australia, often working shoulder-to-shoulder with structural firefighters from local municipal services such as Kelowna or Fort McMurray.
But at every one of those fires where he and his crew risked their safety alongside their municipal colleagues, there was one perplexing difference: According to the federal government, Mr. Larson, who worked for both BC and Alberta Wildfire, was not classified as a firefighter at all.
“It’s something that always confused me, my entire time working with the Alberta government and the B.C. government,” Mr. Larson said. The vast majority of wildland firefighters in Canada are classified as silviculture or forestry workers under Canada’s National Occupational Classification system, the NOC. It’s a holdover from wildland firefighting’s early decades, when the job wasn’t to protect homes, towns and lives – it was to protect timber values as part of the country’s forestry industry.
Municipal firefighters, whose job is mostly to battle structure fires but who increasingly also respond to urban wildfires, are classified as “firefighters,” a category that also includes airport and shipboard firefighters.join their municipal counterparts, a cause most recently championed by Vancouver Island MP Gord Johns. Mr. Johns said classifying wildland firefighters differently than their municipal colleagues means wildland firefighters could have more difficulty claiming pension improvements and early retirement the way their structural fire colleagues and other emergency responders can.
That’s because those classified as firefighters under the NOC are automatically considered public safety workers. Silviculture workers, such as tree planters, are not. Claiming the public safety worker benefits relies on employers recognizing the toll firefighting takes on workers’ bodies. Wildland firefighters say their employers often use their existing classification as silviculture workers to argue that the federal government doesn’t consider them true firefighters at all, and deny them the benefits.
“We identify as firefighters, so recognition is big,” said Sebastian Kallos, a wildland firefighter and union representative with the BC General Employees Union.in the House of Commons, urging the federal government to “immediately correct the misclassification of wildland and forest firefighters in the National Occupational Classification by recognizing them as firefighters,” giving them the same public safety recognition as police, structural firefighters, paramedics and even air traffic controllers. “For these workers to be deemed silviculture or forestry workers, when they’re going out there and performing life-threatening duties, as other firefighters do… to deny them the recognition is absolutely insulting,” Mr. Johns said.
, and climate change has made that fuel more combustible. These days, wildland firefighters aren’t just at the ends of logging roads protecting tree farms and timber values – they’re often on the edges of Canada’s towns and cities, trying to hold back the flames of ever-larger fires. Twenty years ago, wildland firefighters in B.C.
– long one of the busiest provinces for wildfires in the country – would maybe spend 40 to 50 days a year at the front lines of a fire, exposed to smoke and sleeping in tents on the ground, Mr. Kallos said.
“Now it’s doubled, so it’s 100 days a year for the average wildfire fighter in B.C. ” Responsibilities are also shifting – they’re not just fighting fire anymore. In Western Canada, wildland firefighters are increasingly called to respond not just to wildfires, but to all types of natural disastersMembers of the BC Wildfire Service were involved in the response to February’s mass shooting in Tumbler Ridge, helping set up temporary classrooms for students.
But their classification as silviculture workers places them alongside tree planters and forestry equipment operators in the NOC. The occupations in their category are described as “a variety of duties related to reforestation and to the management, improvement and conservation of forest lands. ” The NOC is overseen jointly by Statistics Canada and Emergency and Social Development Canada.
It is updated every 10 years alongside the federal census to reflect changes in workplace demands and the labour market.it’s common for workers in the same industry to be classified under different sections of the NOC. The fact that wildland firefighters are categorized alongside tree planters is “not a judgment that wildland firefighters aren’t firefighters,” Ms. Emond wrote.
Updates this year to the NOC will include changes to wildland firefighters’ occupational descriptions and will be published in December, but there is no plan to move them to the existing firefighter NOC category, she added. During the most recent contract negotiations with its firefighters’ union, the B.C. government agreed to extend pension and early retirement benefits to wildland firefighters, allowing them to retire five years earlier than other public sector workers.
The province also created the first university program for wildland firefighters at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, and is working to make the BC Wildfire Service a year-round all-hazards response agency. B.C. ’s Forests Minister Ravi Parmar wants to see similar changes roll out nationwide, and is encouraged by Mr. Johns’ motion. In depth: Canada’s wildland fire agencies want better masks to stop smoke.
If only it were that easy Mr. Kallos points to another reason. The NOC is largely a data-collection tool overseen by Statistics Canada. It sets the terms under which Canadian workers are categorized and counted. The proponents of Mr. Johns’ motion worry that misclassifying wildland firefighters as silviculture workers means they aren’t accurately counted when the federal data agency tracks things such as the rate of workplace injury, illness and death among firefighters.
“You have a 10,000-person cohort of wildland firefighters that are not being captured under the current classification framework,” Mr. Kallos said. “So the data on firefighters is bad by 10,000, which I would call a significant error. ”as a wildland firefighter, Mr. Larson now works for the Richmond fire department. He’s now officially considered a firefighter by the federal government, but he hasn’t forgotten his former crewmates.
He’s travelled to Ottawa each winter for the past two years to advocate for better pay, better benefits and a reliable pension for wildland firefighters, all the things he says he never got as a crew leader in B.C. and Alberta. As fire seasons continue to worsen, Mr. Larson said this only underscores the need for Ottawa to recognize that both structural and wildland firefighters are equally important when it comes to keeping people and communities safe.
Firefighters themselves already see it, he said.
“In my department now, with my past experience, everyone gives me that credit that I was actually fighting fires all the time, and it was super hard work,” he
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