Unless they become fire paramedics in which case they get paid well, only work 100 days of the year while getting paid for their time off, have awesome insurance, and get to party with hot chicks that chase firemen around : )
Only catch is that you have to run into burning buildings.
...and which means you usually end up not doing anything useful on the squad anyways as the powers that be only want EMS on the FD for the cash. I have lost count of the number of "firemedics" (so ashamed of being EMT's they cannot even put paramedic on their uniform or truck), who have killed patients by not do anything, shrugged, and then get called heroes by everyone.
Meanwhile, the rest of us paramedics get told by the firefighters how we are not "real" paramedics due to not having that magic 6 weeks of fire school on top of our 2 years of solid insanity that can drop you for failing any test.
...
Sorry about that. It's EMS week here and I have had to actually kick firefighters out of the EMS room for denying 3rd party EMS units access on that very reason.
The Schwa represents! This was actually quite good compared to 90% of stuff that paramedics and paramedic students put out. Also starting wage for paramedics in Ontario is on average roughly 30 an hour. They are grossly underpaid and overworked.