About people tending to call only for more serious conditions - I believe, in all honesty, that's a rural / suburban thing. Get into an urban area, where poor people are less likely to have a car or cab money, and get ready to run your a** off on BS like that. People are pretty good about the roads, though - that brings up something else interesting; do you all "roll with" Optocons? (e.g. in major metro areas and even increasingly out in the suburbs, our approaching ambulance throws any 4- way intersection light to stop-all-ways with an IR beacon. Best. Thing. Ever.) And, yes, it is strange culturally to see so many postings about the LFB as a completely distinct entity; you'll notice from the video and elsewhere that it's not at all uncommon (indeed probably slightly more often than not, especially in all-unpaid-volunteer systems,) that Fire/EMS are one department. (Your St. John's seems to be a sort of auxiliary service, not sure what it's like out in the hinterlands, but in the US outside cities of about 50,000+, your EMT is likely to be an unpaid part-time cross-trained firefighter. Even paramedics, actually. Paid and unpaid EMS have , usually, identical training and equipment, dispatch, etc. I've seen anecdotally that your coastal rescue service is somewhat similar? (in that you don't seem to governmentally run it like a Coast Guard, but instead have municipal volunteer corporations? I could be very wrong, here.) It does go a long way towards facilitating things like vehicular rescue / landing sites / mass casualty incidents, etc. that I can grab anyone on scene in a turnout coat, put them in the ambo, and there's an EMT who knows where all the stuff is (or alternately drive the truck or land my helo, all on the same frequencies, 911 system, etc.) The police are a whole different bag, attempts to integrate that have usually failed badly, but from our perspective, it seems that the Fire / EMS / Rescue roles have so much overlap that there's more to be lost than gained by seperating them...(intra-discipline bitching aside.)