What Does This Have To Do With City Wages?

Vancouver Median Home Price $670,000
Nanaimo Median Home Price $329,000

Nanaimo Firefighters are paid the same as Vancouver

You may have recently noticed the IAFF's contract for Nanaimo firefighters included a hefty 5.5% raise and is only to the end of 2011. What does that have to do with Vancouver home prices?

Well, sometime in the past unions were able to strong arm the provincial government into accepting wage parity for firefighters across the province. Hence, the firefighter living in Nanaimo is paid on par with the firefighter in Vancouver and they won't settle until they get it.

Everyone loves a firefighter, they get our cats out of trees and are ready to save us from all manner of peril and in Nanaimo, they occasionally even put out fires. They are also first to roll when someone has a medical emergency and sometimes are needed when the ambulance doesn't arrive before them. All well and good, when they do have to work they in fact are an invaluable member of the community. Whether we need the number of fire stations and number of four man trucks at each station is another matter. Whether we also need as many officers in the system as we seem to have is yet another matter.

This is budget time and we are looking at another city tax increase this year of at least 5%, likely more by the time you include RDN, NRGH and SD68. We are likely seriously underfunding our water, sewer and roads which means a tax increase that would cover our REAL costs would more likely be in the area of 15%.

So, you have to ask yourself, can we really afford to be paying our firefighters the same wage as a firefighter is paid, living in Vancouver?