Canada's wildland firefighters still aren't officially firefighters

Harold Larson spent two decades battling wildfires across B.C., Alberta, the U.S. and Australia, often working shoulder-to-shoulder with structural firefighters from municipal services like Kelowna and Fort McMurray. Yet according to the federal government, Larson was never officially classified as a firefighter at all.

The vast majority of wildland firefighters in Canada are classified as silviculture or forestry workers under the National Occupational Classification system — a holdover from when wildland firefighting was primarily about protecting timber values rather than homes, towns and lives. Municipal firefighters are classified as "firefighters," a category that also includes airport and shipboard firefighters, automatically making them public safety workers eligible for pension improvements and early retirement.

Wildland firefighters say employers use their existing silviculture classification to argue the federal government doesn't consider them true firefighters and therefore deny them benefits available to structural fire colleagues and other emergency responders.

"We identify as firefighters, so recognition is big," said Sebastian Kallos, a wildland firefighter and union representative. In early May, Vancouver Island MP Gord Johns tabled a motion urging the federal government to correct the misclassification immediately.

The classification affects more than recognition. Climate change has made wildfire seasons longer and more intense — wildland firefighters in B.C. now spend roughly 100 days a year at the front lines, double the 40-50 days from two decades ago. Responsibilities have expanded beyond firefighting to include response to floods, landslides and other natural disasters.

Kallos points out that roughly 10,000 wildland firefighters aren't being captured under the current classification framework, making federal workplace injury and illness statistics incomplete. Statistics Canada says updates to the NOC this year will include changes to wildland firefighters' descriptions, but no plan exists to move them to the existing firefighter category.

B.C. has started addressing the gap — the province recently extended pension and early retirement benefits to wildland firefighters and created the first university program for wildland firefighting at Thompson Rivers University. Larson, who now works for the Richmond fire department and is officially considered a firefighter, has travelled to Ottawa twice to advocate for better pay, benefits and pensions for his former crewmates.

"Both structural and wildland firefighters are equally important when it comes to keeping people and communities safe," he said.