In the US, saying “pan pan” or Mayday means exactly the same thing, and will get you a response from ATC that’s says: “understand you are declaring an emergency”.
Furthermore, the ARFF is required to be activated a certain number of times every month, just to make sure that everything works correctly. A malfunctioning gear light that prompts a request for a tower flyby so that they can tell you that “your gear appears to be down” (they won’t, of course tell you that it actually is, for obvious liability reasons) will generally result in the tower telling you that “We are going to roll the trucks, just in case” I have had it happen more than a few times, and it was never stated as a request to do so.