Fire department can’t run on overtime

The most recent administrative report to Winnipeg’s standing policy committee on finance and economic development confirms what frontline firefighters have been warning for years: Winnipeg’s fire service is running on overtime — literally and financially.

According to the city’s numbers, the Winnipeg Fire Paramedic Service (WFPS) is forecast to exceed its 2025 operating budget by $7.47 million, including $6.9 million in fire overtime and $6 million in Workers Compensation Board (WCB) costs. That’s not a temporary blip — it’s part of a long-term trend of structural underfunding masked by expensive overtime.

In 2009, the city’s audit department highlighted that insufficient staffing was the primary driver of overtime, indicating it would be cheaper to hire than rely on premium pay.

In 2018, another city-commissioned analysis came to the same conclusion, reporting that the $2 million spent in premium pay that year could have instead funded 20 full-time firefighter positions. The logic was simple: hire firefighters and reduce overtime pressure. Instead, city hall doubled down on short-term fixes, choosing to backfill vacancies through overtime rather than staffing properly. The results have been predictable — and costly.

Since 2016, WCB costs have risen 314 per cent, and the lost-time injury severity rate has climbed 361 per cent. Fire overtime itself has increased 385 per cent since 2018, reaching nearly $9.7 million in 2025. The city has spent more than $56 million in fire overtime since 2018 — the equivalent of 560 full-time firefighter-years.

Let that sink in. The city could have increased its staffing by over 70 firefighters, fully covering the costs every year, for the same price it paid in overtime.

The city’s report says it is “working with WCB to determine the cause of increased time loss.”

With respect, this is not a complex question.

When people are chronically overworked and exposed to extreme levels of cumulative and acute occupational stress, they get sick, injured or lose their lives. Firefighting is already among the most physically and psychologically demanding professions in Canada. Add excessive overtime and long-term staff shortages, and you create the perfect storm for burnout, injury and disability.

Winnipeg is the busiest fire department in the country, with WFPS responding to three times the 911 call volume per capita of comparable Canadian cities. In four years, structure fires have increased 87 per cent, medical calls 23 per cent and vacant structure fires 245 per cent. By last year, WFPS call volumes had already surpassed the city’s 2040 projections. Yet the number of staffed fire apparatus and firefighters on duty remains lower than it was 50 years ago.

This isn’t a problem of inefficiency — it’s a problem of math. More calls with fewer people equals more overtime. More overtime equals more fatigue. More fatigue equals more injuries, higher WCB costs and even more overtime. It’s a vicious cycle of exhaustion and expense.

City council has known about this for years. The 2009 audit and 2018 staffing analysis spelled it out clearly. The city has chosen to “manage” the problem instead of solving it — moving money from reserves and discretionary accounts to patch over the same structural gaps.

That approach has come at an enormous price. The cumulative $56 million in overtime since 2018 could have fundamentally changed the trajectory of our department.

Instead, apparatus availability declines, response times grow and Winnipeggers are left waiting when they call 911. Meanwhile, the WCB crisis continues to worsen. In 2024, approved WCB claims cost the department $11.6 million (of which $7.2 million relates to the fire service), up from $2.8 million in 2016. The report attributes this surge to increased back injuries, psychological claims and long-term absences. Those trends aren’t separate from staffing — they’re symptoms of it.

Even as overtime and injury costs soar, the department continues to expand its administrative footprint. Just this month, WFPS announced the creation of a research and data intelligence branch, staffed with a new district chief of research, multiple quality improvement analysts and a system co-ordinator specializing in AI and data analytics.

The branch’s mandate includes “descriptive, diagnostic, predictive and prescriptive analysis” of departmental data, with predictive modelling extending to 2030. According to the memo circulated to staff, “early predictive analysis already indicates a growth in service demand.” No one on the frontlines needed artificial intelligence to figure that out — firefighters have been saying it for decades.

While future planning and data-driven decision-making have their place, it’s hard to reconcile this investment in analytics with the day-to-day reality on the floor. Frontline fire crews are being asked to do more with less, while resources are redirected to data projects studying why the service is struggling — instead of fixing the problem everyone already understands: not enough firefighters to meet demand.

Why do we keep investing in studies, analytics and reports — only to ignore their findings? Every audit, consultant review and now AI-driven forecast has pointed to the same conclusion for over a decade: Winnipeg’s fire department is critically understaffed.

When the city talks about cost savings, it often treats overtime as the lesser evil — easier to manage by drawing on the financial stabilization reserve than by adding positions. But that argument doesn’t hold up under scrutiny.

The reserve — the city’s fiscal safety net — is itself underfunded. By policy, it’s supposed to maintain a minimum balance equal to six per cent of tax-supported expenditures, but years of structural deficits, pandemic costs and financial pressures have left it far below that level. At one point during COVID-19, the fund was fully depleted. It was later rebuilt to $17.6 million at the end of 2024, and is projected to reach $21.5 million by the end of 2025 — still well short of the council-mandated minimum. In other words, Winnipeg is borrowing from an already underfunded reserve to cover the cost of overtime created by its own staffing shortages.

This is fiscal circular logic. Overtime is not cheaper; it’s deferred debt with an even greater cost.

Every overtime hour represents another firefighter too exhausted to work, another crew stretched thin, another injury waiting to happen. It represents an invisible cost — not just in dollars, but in safety and service.

At the same time, Winnipeg’s population continues to grow, and call volumes are increasing faster than any other major Canadian city. The city’s multi-year budget continues to lean on outdated assumptions, referencing a “2020 strategic direction” that projected 2040 call volumes — projections that were already exceeded by 2023. In other words, our operational reality has outpaced city hall’s planning by nearly two decades.

The city has a choice. It can either invest in the frontline firefighters who keep this city safe, or continue to pour millions into a broken system. It can take concrete steps to build a sustainable, properly staffed department — or it can kick the problem down the road yet again, at the expense of firefighter health and public safety. Their decision will be a clear indicator of where this council’s priorities lie.

The path forward is not complicated. Cities like Calgary and Toronto have been demonstrating it for years. Staffing the job properly costs less — and saves lives. Winnipeg can no longer afford Band-Aid budgets and burnout. City council must have the courage to fix what every report, every audit and every frontline firefighter already knows: Overtime is not the solution. It’s the symptom of a system that’s breaking.

Nick Kasper is the president of the United Fire Fighters of Winnipeg (IAFF Local 867).