By Monica Shannon
On March 16, the Ambulance Paramedics of BC (CUPE Local 873) ratified a new collective agreement. The union’s 6,000 members, primarily paramedics and 911 dispatchers, had voted 97 percent in favour of job action in February, with their demands including wage increases, sufficient staffing and improved supports around burnout and other psychological injury.
For years, the union’s members have been on the frontlines of a deepening healthcare crisis shaped by the COVID-19 pandemic, a decade-long toxic drug emergency and privatization efforts. As hospital overcrowding, emergency room closures and systemic failures mount, these first responders are increasingly forced to fill the gaps, providing urgent care and transporting patients to increasingly distant facilities with limited available capacity.
Alongside their fellow healthcare workers, paramedics are facing unsustainable workloads and escalating rates of burnout. BC paramedics accessed critical incident supports 3,636 times in 2022, reflecting the psychological toll of their work. In August 2025, the Ambulance Paramedics of BC reported that nearly a third of their members were either off for mental health leave or receiving related treatment while continuing to work.
Union spokesperson Ian Tait also emphasized that “there’s actually a certain percentage of our members up there that are suffering and getting no treatment whatsoever” owing to stigma. The consequences have been fatal, with five BC paramedics dying from suicide in 2025, a sharp increase from previous years.
As first-responders take leave or exit the profession without adequate replacement, their absence intensifies the workloads of those who remain. Chronic understaffing in healthcare eventually cascades into emergency room closures, forcing patients to travel farther for care and placing added pressure on paramedics tasked with keeping them alive during longer transports. As Tait explained in a recent interview, these diversions can add hours to crises where every second can make a difference between life and death, and further grind down overstretched medics.
In response, BC Emergency Health Services began instituting restrictions on overtime and created more permanent full-time positions as a cost-saving measure intended to provide more consistent coverage.
However, the policy has had the opposite effect: staffing flexibility has been reduced, leaving shifts unfilled and ambulances sitting empty. By limiting overtime and flexible scheduling, BCEHS reduced the availability of auxiliary and part-time support, making it harder to backfill shifts when full-time medics need to step away. The result is greater pressure on medics who are increasingly pushed into overtime anyway (often with little to no notice) while facing unsustainable workloads and deepening burnout. To date, 400 of these positions remain vacant.
Patients across the province are seeing the consequences. There were almost 200 emergency department closures in the first half of 2025. Analysis of ER closure data by Health Data BC demonstrates the disproportionate impacts of the crisis in rural, remote and Indigenous communities. This data, obtained via a Freedom of Information request, documents 1,800 unplanned ER closures between January 2023 and April 2025.
The data is revealing. In northern BC, Chetwynd’s hospital was closed 196 times – the closest hospitals are over an hour away. The ER in neighboring Hudson’s Hope was closed 182 times. Mackenzie’s hospital was closed 177 times – patients were forced to drive to Prince George, more than two hours away. During the 2025 holiday season, repeated ER closures in 100 Mile House forced paramedics to drive patients nearly 100 kilometres to Williams Lake.
In each case, longer distances and delays placed added strain on paramedics, who must work harder to keep patients alive in transit.
Even when rural emergency rooms remain open, access to care is not guaranteed. Until recently, the northwest community of Stewart only had two medics to serve roughly 500 residents. When both medics were unavailable last summer (one on medical leave, the other on a much-needed vacation) 911 callers were told it would take up to five hours for responders to drive up from Houston.
The failure is not on these overextended medics, but on a system that refuses to make necessary investment in public healthcare. As journalist Rob Shaw points out, northwest BC’s mining bonanza has led to “billions of dollars of industrial activity [flowing] in and around the community. And yet, it can’t even get basic emergency services from the province.”
Similarly, the northern town of Kitwanga, located about halfway between Houston and Stewart, has been lobbying the province for almost a decade to replace its ambulance station. The station is currently unusable due to mold infestation. In this case, the province is willing to fund paramedics for the town and the three local First Nations, but so far has refused to provide a safe site for them to work.
All of this is preventable. Addressing paramedic burnout requires more than mental health supports: it means eliminating the conditions that produce it. No healthcare worker should be forced to choose between stress leave and unsafe workloads, and no patient should have to travel hundreds of kilometres for basic emergency care.
What is needed is a major expansion of public healthcare, particularly community-based primary and preventative services, so that emergency rooms are not overwhelmed by unmet primary care needs. As the BC Rural Health Network has argued, the system must shift from a reactive model to one that proactively supports health and wellbeing in rural communities.
From a class perspective, the crisis reflects political choices about where resources are directed. Stopgap measures like a travelling paramedic program may provide temporary relief, but they do not address chronic understaffing rooted in underinvestment. At the same time, spending within BC’s health authorities has increasingly flowed toward administrative and corporate expenditures, while frontline services face shortages.
More broadly, public funds continue to be diverted toward military expansion and industrial enrichment rather than social needs. The result is a system that asks workers to do more with less while communities are left without care. Reversing this trend requires sustained public investment in healthcare infrastructure and staffing, and a reorientation of priorities toward meeting human needs rather than preserving existing economic and political arrangements.
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