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Last month, city council in Kitchener, Ont., voted soundly to axe half a million dollars from the city’s fire department budget after noting that its staff costs had leaped an incredible 22% in only five years.

“It is not just Kitchener, it is every municipality … it is totally unsustainable,” said Mayor Carl Zehr in the lead-up to the vote, according to the Waterloo Region Record.

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The decision went counter to a 14-page November letter drafted by the Kitchener Professional Fire Fighters Association. In it, complete with graphs and charts showing how quickly residential fires can spread, the union wrote that “community safety” was in jeopardy.

“We realize that although financial constraints are always present in budget management, we must … not sacrifice safety in order to balance operating budgets,” it concluded.

Road workers get pink slips and librarians get salary cuts, but firefighters have often ridden through tough economic times with steady pay and untouched staffing levels. But in an age of fireproofing and smoke detectors, increasingly idle fire stations are proving a tempting target for belt-tightening cities across Canada. As firefighters hit back with warnings of untended blazes and trapped families, however, the struggle to reform Canadian firefighting is not looking pretty.