Who Said We Needed This?
Nanaimo added 40 full-time firefighters for less than one extra call per day.
Nanaimo families are cutting back. Seniors are counting pennies. Small businesses are being squeezed. Yet council somehow found room to add 40 full-time firefighters to an already costly department. That decision was approved in two phases — 20 effective August 2023 and 20 more effective January 2025.
Now put that beside the incident picture.
Using the City’s own annual incident reports, total calls went from 11,108 in 2023 to 11,422 in 2025. That is an increase of 314 calls over the entire year — less than one extra call per day. Yet over that same period, the four 24/7 stations moved from 85 career firefighters to 125 career firefighters.
So the obvious question is the one council never seems to like hearing:
Who said we needed this?
Not who liked the idea.
Not who thought it sounded safe.
Not who wanted to avoid political heat.
Who actually proved Nanaimo taxpayers needed to carry this bill?
Because the public was never shown a city suddenly engulfed in flames. Quite the opposite. The incident pattern shows what many people already suspect: this department is driven far more by medical calls than by actual fires. Fire trucks and public affection may sell the spending, but the workload story is something else entirely.
To be fair, council was not sold this expansion mainly as a response to a dramatic spike in structure fires. Staff framed it around response standards, concurrent calls, effective response force requirements, growth, and peer comparisons, along with the claim that Nanaimo had more incidents per firefighter than comparable departments. That was the official case.
Fine. Then council should have been able to answer a very basic taxpayer question:
Why was a permanent 40-person expansion the right answer when the actual incident load barely moved?
That is where this starts to smell less like necessity and more like culture. In government, once the word “safety” is invoked, too many elected officials lose the courage to say no. But “safety” is not a magic word that cancels mathematics. If it were, there would be no limit to how many firefighters, police officers, nurses, doctors, or paramedics government could justify hiring. There is always one more position that might improve safety at the margin. The problem is that taxpayers do not live at the margin. They live in the real world, where money runs out.
And right now, the non-government sector is being squeezed harder than ever.
That is the part council never seems to grasp. Every new public hire lands on somebody’s property tax bill, rent payment, business overhead, grocery budget, or retirement income. Every expansion has a cost. Every “yes” from council eventually becomes a “pay up” for somebody else.
So no, this is not an attack on firefighters. It is a challenge to council’s judgment.
Did Nanaimo really need 40 more full-time firefighters?
Or did council approve an expensive staffing model because opposing it would have been politically uncomfortable?
The numbers do not show a department overwhelmed by exploding demand. They show a department whose staffing grew far faster than its incident load.
Which leaves the question still hanging over city hall:
Who said we needed this — and why did council believe them?
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