Sudbury hired 116 paramedics in 5 years—headcount stayed flat

For HR and workforce leaders, Sudbury's numbers are a masterclass in how headcount stability can hide catastrophic churn. The city hired 116 paramedics over five years — 69% of its current roster — yet ended with virtually the same workforce size, meaning it effectively replaced its entire field staff just to stand still. With half of primary care paramedics now under five years of service and advanced care clinicians down 17%, the real problem is retention, not recruitment.

A City of Greater Sudbury staffing report has given the municipality's paramedic union what it says is long-overdue confirmation: the service is losing experienced paramedics faster than it can replace them, and years of hiring have not grown the workforce. The report, received by city council's Community and Emergency Services Committee on June 15, 2026, shows the city hired 116 paramedics between 2020 and 2025 — roughly 69 per cent of its current workforce — yet the overall size of the service remained virtually unchanged. CUPE Local 4705, which represents about 200 paramedics and logistics staff, made the figures public on July 8 and framed them as proof of a retention crisis requiring urgent action.

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The city hired 116 paramedics over five years — 69% of its current roster — yet ended with virtually the same workforce size, meaning it effectively replaced its entire field staff just to stand still.

The stakes are elevated by geography and volume. Greater Sudbury Paramedic Services is responsible for seamless emergency coverage across approximately 9,221 square kilometres and answers about 32,000 calls per year. In that operating context, workforce stability is a public-safety issue as much as a human-resources one. The composition of the workforce has deteriorated even as hiring continued. About half of all primary care paramedics now have less than five years of service, and the number of advanced care paramedics — clinicians with additional training who handle the most acute calls — fell from 69 in 2020 to 57 in 2025, a decline of roughly 17 per cent.

For workforce analysts, Sudbury's numbers are a textbook case of a lagging indicator masking a crisis. Headcount was flat, so leadership could plausibly describe staffing as stable. But hiring 116 people into a service of roughly 200 over five years while ending at the same size means nearly every new hire replaced a departing one — an effective turnover of the entire field staff. That is an expensive treadmill. Each replacement carries recruitment, certification, orientation and field-training costs, and a newly hired paramedic does not deliver the same productivity as a 10-year veteran until months of supervised road time have passed. The rising share of clinicians with under five years of service also means the service is bleeding institutional knowledge: familiarity with the region's geography, hospital protocols, and the judgment that only comes from handling complex calls over many years.

The decline in advanced care paramedics is arguably the sharpest signal in the data. Losing 12 ACPs over five years while total headcount stays flat suggests the highest-credentialed, most experienced staff are the hardest to retain — a pattern familiar across Ontario and much of Canada, where burnout, hospital offload delays, mental-health strain and competition from better-funded services pull paramedics away. Because ACPs can perform more invasive procedures and often anchor critical calls, their loss cannot be offset simply by hiring more primary care paramedics.