It was a noisy afternoon in uptown St. Stephen as CUPE 4848, representing paramedics and dispatchers, held an information rally.
South Regional President Chris Wall says their system with Ambulance New Brunswick is broken, with too many vacancies, and he doesn’t feel enough work is being put into recruitment and retaining employees. One of the main issues CUPE is protesting is hiring practices that put bilingualism above medical skills.
“The vacations are what broke the camel’s back. We’ve got number one on the seniority list here protesting with us, forty-two years of service and he can’t get a vacation day approved to go see his family back in April. The only vacation that’s really been approved is some in the summer in the South, but East, West, and North (New Brunswick) due to open vacancies, they’ve been denied.”
He says the paramedics have reached their breaking point, “We’ve had enough, we’re burnt out, overworked, and there’s people that work more overtime hours than straight time. It’s got to the point where we can’t keep working like that. We need more bodies. We need the bodies that are here to want to come to work. They’re just so burnt, they’re tired, they’re either injured mentally or physically because of the strain.”
Wall has been a paramedic for eight years and says he still can’t get a full-time position, but he could if he wanted to move to northern New Brunswick, where they are feeling the opposite effect of of the South with not enough English speaking paramedics.
A few dignitaries stood side by side the paramedics at the rally, Provincial Conservative Leader Blaine Higgs was one of them.
“We should be looking at hiring for skill and training for language. That’s the federal program, that’s the way the federal government works. You put timelines on it, but you first and foremost deal with job one – have the service available to citizens. To think that we’re doing anything otherwise is shocking.”
Higgs says the same issue is affecting both the North and the South, as the North needs more English-speaking workers and the South needs more french-speaking. He calls this a common sense issue, “The government has found a way to delay anything. They basically said, ‘oh, we’ll put it into a judicial review’. Well all that is is postponing it until after the election.”
CUPE is asking residents to take the issue to their local MLA.
