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“Our growth in front-line resources does not match the growth in call volume, never mind the growth in population, and at the end of the day we’re about 50 units shy in this province just to keep up with growth,” said Parker.

The union head said given the current situation, there wouldn’t be sufficient capacity to respond to a major emergency.

“When you look at the incident last week of snowfall — they had to start calling in people, and that takes hours to bring people in to help backfill a system that is totally stressed,” said Parker. “If it was an earthquake, if it was a terror attack, that incident is happening now, and we don’t have the two and three hours to call people in on overtime.”

But Darren Sandbeck, chief paramedic for Alberta Health Services, said while a large-scale event will challenge any EMS system, AHS is able to flex the system to respond to those types of events.

“We’ve demonstrated over the years our ability to respond to those, including Fort McMurray wildfires, southern Alberta floods, and more recent, large events like a significant multi-vehicle motor vehicle collision this winter that involved a large number of resources,” said Sandbeck.

Documents released by the association also show the number of times, between November 2015 and June 2017, that ambulances were asked to leave the area where they are based — including 2,731 times in Calgary, 2,436 times in Priddis, 2,217 times in Airdrie, 5,819 times in Stony Plain and 3,713 times in Edmonton.