“Volunteer fire departments in general are having recruitment challenges and retention challenges and (an) increase in the tax writeoff is just another tool to make being a volunteer firefighter more attractive and staying a volunteer firefighter more attractive,” said Archambault. B.C. member of Parliament Gord Johns has been working with the Canadian Association of Fire Chiefs to try to boost the credit for volunteer firefighters and search and rescue volunteers to $10,000. …Ken McMullen said there were 156,000 volunteer firefighters in Canada in 2016, but that was down to 126,000 in 2022. Increasing the tax credit would be a small step in countering the downward trend. …McMullen said recruitment and retention could be facing pressure because of the range of risks faced by first responders, from injuries and increased cancer rates, to the mental health toll of facing emergency situations.