Copyright 2006 Toronto Star Newspapers, Ltd.
By KERRY GILLESPIE
The Toronto Star (Canada)
At 48, Brian Parsons’ knees are shot and he doesn’t see how he’ll stay on the job long enough to retire with a full pension.
He’s the guy racing up the stairs — carrying a 35-kilogram stretcher and medical equipment — to try to save someone’s life.
Parsons and other paramedics don’t understand why they’re being treated differently in proposed pension legislation than firefighters who race up ladders to put out fires.
“They’ve always been recognized as the heroes going into the flaming building and pulling people out,” said Parsons’ partner Steve Henderson, 41.
“But we’re risking our lives, too,” Henderson, said, referring to paramedics who get ill on the job from contact with diseases as deadly as SARS.
Then there’s the emotional toll.
“Our last two patients were both very sick and there’s a good chance both of them will die,” Henderson said.
“It’s terrible to have to come in and do a job like this, knowing other people are doing a lot less work and getting better benefits and getting treated better.”
At issue is Bill 206, an act to revise the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System (OMERS).
It is designed to put municipalities in charge of OMERS $40 billion pension plan.
But there is controversy over amendments that give police, firefighters and, to some degree, paramedics, supplemental plans allowing them to retire earlier with full benefits, while at the same time requiring a hard-to-achieve two-thirds majority vote to make pension improvements for everyone else.
Union leader Sid Ryan has promised that more than 100,000 Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) members will walk off the job at midnight on the day the government begins final debate on the bill.
That could be as early as today or as late as March 2.
The bill gives paramedics the same right as police and firefighters to negotiate such enhanced pension benefits as a higher accrual rate or basing a pension on the best three years of wages instead of best five.
But the government did not give paramedics what they wanted - normal retirement at 60.
Police and firefighters have this already, but paramedics were left at 65 so they will not benefit as much from the supplemental plans.
“We’re enraged as a group. We don’t even feel that CUPE is working for us. Our little fight isn’t their focus,” Parsons said.
If paramedics want an earlier normal retirement age, they will have to get a two-thirds vote from the new OMERS board or a simple majority to get it to mediation and arbitration.
Union leaders say they likely won’t get this.
The government says it’s only fair.
“That would directly impact on municipal costs and that’s something we think should be negotiated. It shouldn’t be imposed,” said MPP Brad Duguid, parliamentary assistant to Municipal Affairs Minister John Gerretsen.
Firefighters have succeeded in getting the government to take up their cause, in granting the supplemental benefits they wanted in the first place.
But paramedics haven’t been so successful.
Part of that is because they do not speak with one voice.
About half of the province’s 6,000 paramedics are represented by CUPE, said Mike Dick, CUPE ambulance committee chair. The others belong to a variety of different unions.
Fred Le Blanc, president of the Ontario Professional Firefighters Association, cannot believe how the debate over pension reform has, in some ways, become an attack on firefighters.
“It’s been frustrating for our members,” Le Blanc said.
That’s why Le Blanc held a news conference last week and brought 300 firefighters to the Legislature.
They got a real boost, he said, from hearing Premier Dalton McGuinty.
“We recognize that these men and women assume special responsibilities, that they assume great risk and danger every day as part of their job. When we rush out of burning buildings, they rush in to help us get out. We’ve created a provision in this bill that recognizes the work they do on our behalf,” McGuinty said on Thursday.
That kind of statement leaves Parsons cold.
“We’re not anti-firefighter. But, most of their calls now, they come and assist us on (medical) calls. It’s like the helpers are getting a better deal than the workers.”
Ron Bull Toronto Star At ambulance station 44, paramedics Brian Parsons, 48, foreground, and Steve Henderson, 41, prepare for the start of their shift. They want to be granted retirement at 60.