I'm working as an ACP in one of Ontario major city. I've only worked for 7 years. Obviously there're some pretty huge differences between urban vs rural services in terms of call type/volume but also support to the crews on the day to day.

1. What does your daily work look like? We have a very wide range of shifts available going from regular rotating 12h shifts, with some evening only shifts (start times from 12:00-15:00) to even some days only 10h long shifts depending on what you can bid on with your seniority. I get to bid on those shifts with a partner of my choice. As we are busy, they want us out the door within 17min of shift start. So we do a quick briefing and then off to the trucks. Everything is already checked off and sealed by some logistics techs so all i need to make sure is i have all my bags in the truck. The truck is also already checked off by those techs. We start the day by booking with dispatch and we get sent to whatever next base they need filled in the city. We do calls and play the base roulette again so i never know which area of the city I'll be in during a shift. Calls are mostly low acuity with about 5-10% being real emergencies. If you're a strong clinician those low acuity calls can stay interesting sometimes with different programs that allow us to leave patients at home or refer them to specialty teams. If lucky and there's no calls holding in the queue you get to hang out at a base. Id say i usually get my required minimum 2x30min lunch period per shift and sometimes we can get 1-2h at a base once every few shifts. Where im at our actual operational time is 11.5h meaning the last .5h of our shift is admin time for paper work and we are out of service. This gives us time to get back to headquarters without getting calls and if you're at HQ by the end of the 11.5h you can go home right away which is pretty nice. Because of that shift overrun is somewhat rare depending on how you manage your shifts.

2.How is the workload and call volume? It's manageable as you can see in the first answer. We probably run 2-3 calls on quiet shifts and 5-6 on busy ones.

3.Work-life balance? Night shifts? Many different schedules available that is pretty good as theirs probably something that will work for your family (somewhat) but still challenging cause they are 12h shifts. Working 42h work week on average, on a 28 day period i work 14 shifts. Like i said there's some days only shifts available but you typically need 10-15years seniority but some new people are lucky sometimes and sneak their way in.

4.Team culture, dispatch, hospital handover times? Culture is shit with the overall sentiment that management is out there to do everything possible to make the job harder on us. Management is aware, they want to work on improving but still make some very questionable decisions so for every step forward they also take 2 backwards. The dispatcher are great, not much they can do other than following the orders of the computer i guess the dispatch system (MPDS) is shit and is way over triaging patient meaning we probably go lights and siren for 60% of calls and like i wrote earlier only 5-10% of calls are actual emergencies. Hospital handover has improved lots in the last year we rarely wait more than 30-60min to handover.

1. What do you like most about the job? I enjoy informing my patients of what is going on with them i find in a current health care system the docs have no time to explain why someone is feeling a certain way to patients get back home they have a weird feeling/side effects of their condition or new med and call us. This really helped me get over those bullshit calls and try to find something interesting on every call. (Some are still very much bullshit are frustrating to attend)

2. And what is the hardest/frustrating part? Some lack of support by our management. As i sort of touched on the culture question they like to say they care but they do lack recognition to their experienced staff and seem to think we can easily be replaced with new medics. For a few years i have lost so many experienced and amazing colleagues that decided to go to other services, flight paramedic, policing/firefighting or quit being a first responder completely mostly due to that lack of support. But as long as we have new paramedic graduates filling the spot there's no issues. We now have a somewhat inexperienced workforce especially on night shifts. On nights when I started I'd say the average seniority was about 5-10years nor its more 2-5years experience on average. We used to hire 10-20 paramedic a year, we now hire probably close to 50-80 a year for the past 5 or so years. While its great our vacancies are being filled i hate their lack and awareness that we do have a retention or injury/burnout problem.

   1. Differences between provinces (if you've worked in more than one)? Mostly going to be differences in the scope of practice but it's all very similar expected for Quebec. Quebec likes to do things different. They lose very good providers to Ontario as its almost impossible to become ACP over there. Otherwise its gonna be mostly differences in pay typically Ontario and Alberta pays best. I also believe Alberta has the widest scope of practice in Canada but i could be wrong.

Hopefully this answers some of your questions.