More Than Shiny Fire Trucks and Heroes
It Is A Monument To Provincial Failure
This is not mainly a story about fighting fires. It is a story about municipal governments being drawn deeper into medical and overdose response because the crisis is happening on their streets, in real time, in front of businesses and residents. BCEHS still owns ambulance. But Nanaimo taxpayers are paying more and more for municipal people — firefighters and now CSOs — to act as the practical front line of a provincial failure.Incidents Reports Tell The Story
Nanaimo’s own incident reports show that during Q1 from January 1 to April 6 2023 - 2026, the department remained overwhelmingly medical-call driven in every year reviewed. In 2023, before the Fire Master Plan staffing increase, NFR handled 2,711 calls. In 2026, with the full 40 additional firefighters in place, the total was 3,188. That is a 17.6% increase in total calls over the period. Medical calls rose 20.7%, from 1,876 to 2,265. But total fire-related calls actually fell from 206 to 180. The call mix did not show a surge in actual fire incidents. The service remained dominated by medical responses, while fire calls stayed under 8% of total incidents each year.
INCIDENT REPORT
INCIDENT REPORT
INCIDENT REPORT
INCIDENT REPORT
NFR INCIDENT COMPARISON
NFR COMPARISON FIRE/MEDICAL ONLY
What the numbers reveal
- Medical calls are the dominant driver every year.
- All fire calls stay relatively low and fairly flat.
- The biggest staffing shift happened between 2024 and 2025, when Nanaimo moved from the first 20 added to the full 40 added.
In the nutshell:
From 2023 to 2026, during Q1 NFR total calls rose from 2,711 to 3,188 and medical calls rose from 1,876 to 2,265, while all fire calls stayed comparatively low, moving from 206 in 2023 to 180 in 2026.
Beyond the Shiny Fire Trucks and Everyone’s Favourite Heroes
What Nanaimo taxpayers need to understand is this: they are no longer just paying for a fire department that fights fires. They are increasingly paying for a municipal public-safety system that is helping carry a provincial health and addiction burden. Ambulance remains the province’s job through BCEHS. But when the province’s real-world response is not enough, the load spills onto city-funded responders — first firefighters, and now Community Safety Officers as well. BCEHS itself says municipalities pay the cost of sending fire crews on emergency calls.
In Nanaimo, CSOs are not a side note. The City says they deal directly with homelessness, addiction, mental-health challenges and public disorder, patrol 16 hours a day, administered 1,292 doses of naloxone in 2024, and often act as the first point of contact until emergency responders arrive. That is not traditional bylaw work. That is a frontline crisis-response function growing inside municipal government.
So the uncomfortable question is not whether firefighters and CSOs are helping. They clearly are. The real question is why Nanaimo taxpayers are being drawn deeper and deeper into funding overlapping local responses to what is fundamentally a provincial ambulance, health, addiction and mental-health failure. The public still hears “fire department” and imagines hoses and house fires. But the province’s own oversight record says medical emergencies make up the majority of incidents many fire departments attend. Nanaimo’s structure now shows the same drift: more and more local money, more and more medical and overdose response, and less clarity about who is actually responsible.
Comments
Post a Comment
Thank you for your input. Your comment will appear once reviewed.