Canada

Remove oil subsidies and use the money to fight the fires

Nope. School bus drivers were asked to work as drivers for firefighters last summer but they were offering two weeks on/ two weeks off for $20/hour for 8 hour days, food and accommodations not provided. They said to bring at tent.

I said no fucking way.

Would you like to do this vitally important job that requires travel, training, hard labour, living rough, and includes heightened risk of serious injury all for minimum wage?

Seems the answer is obvious.

No, not ever. Where's the hazard pay?

Hey kids, wanna get cancer?

No. That is not enough.

Maybe they should make a reality tv show about it, entertainment is way more lucrative than saving lives. I mean, if they can make crab fishing a show... 😞

In Australia, the Rurals do it for free. You get paid in "camaraderie/comradery".

This is the best summary I could come up with:

"There was a 'help wanted' sign up and the wage that they were offering at the Tim Hortons was higher than all our crew members," said Wigmore in an interview with CBC's What On Earth.

While they made a joke of it at the time, Wigmore — who has about three decades of experience fighting wildfires in Ontario and Alberta — says it felt unfair when she considered the amount of training and work involved in the job.

But in the last 10 years, things have gotten significantly worse and we're essentially seeing people come to Alberta, get their training, work one, two, three seasons and then move on to, typically, Parks Canada or B.C.

It has been "one of the best recruitment years ever," for seasonal wildfire fighters, according to Todd Loewen, Alberta's minister of forestry and parks, though he said this assessment is based on the number of people who responded to the first round of advertising for those positions.

Unlike some other wildfire agencies, such as Parks Canada and those in Northwest Territories, B.C., Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Ontario, seasonal firefighters in Alberta receive no health benefits coverage.

But he worries that hiring more seasonal staff in the middle of a "retention crisis is irresponsible" by spreading the pool of more experienced crew leaders even thinner across the various teams.

The original article contains 1,114 words, the summary contains 222 words. Saved 80%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

No. I would not do so.

If only we (the RoC) had a standing cohesive labour force trained to deploy quickly, bivouac quickly and then do fire stuff.

We're close: we used to have a labour force like it, but they weren't firefighters. Then the conservatives defunded it.

If I got paid for 8 hours and did 4 hours work, yes