Safety & Emergency Readiness

A plain-language explainer · 8th-grade reading level · every figure below is sourced and checkable.

What’s wrong here

When you call 911 in Toronto, one of three services answers: police, fire, or paramedics. Each is under strain, but not the same way.

Start with paramedics. In 2019, Toronto had 29 moments with zero staffed ambulances available anywhere in the city. By 2023, that had jumped to more than 1,200 — a 40-fold increase.¹ The main cause is not a shortage of ambulances. The city has 234 of them, but on a typical day only 126 are staffed and running.² The bigger problem is hospitals. In 2023, a paramedic crew spent two hours on average handling a call — and 71 of those minutes were spent waiting inside a hospital to hand off the patient.³ For the most urgent calls — cardiac arrest, the highest-danger cases — response times got 6% to 14% slower between 2019 and 2023, even though the service still hit its overall targets about 80% of the time.⁴

Police face a different kind of strain. In 2019, average response time for the two most urgent call types was 19 and 50 minutes — against a 6-minute target the police board itself set back in 1995.⁵ Toronto’s 2026 police budget is $1.43 billion, up $93.8 million, funding 143 net new officers.⁶ But a peer-reviewed study of 20 Canadian cities, including Toronto, found no consistent link between rising police spending and falling crime rates.⁷

Gun violence is its own story. In 2024, shootings in Toronto rose 33.6% and gun deaths rose 48.3% — the worst year in over a decade, confirmed by both police records and Statistics Canada.⁸ Young people aged 12 to 29 made up 58% of those involved in shootings, though they are only 23% of the population; nearly half of all shootings happened in areas holding only 22% of the city’s residents.⁹

What’s been proven to work elsewhere

Scotland took a public-health approach to violence: treat it like a disease to prevent, not just punish. Weapon-carrying fell 69% from 2005 to 2016, and hospital admissions from sharp-object assaults fell 63% from 2008 to 2015.¹⁰ That success took more than a decade of steady funding, not a one-year pilot.

Closer to home, Toronto’s own Community Crisis Service — a mental-health response team, not police — has resolved 78% of transferred 911 mental-health calls without police involvement since it launched in 2022.¹¹ That is a working example already running here, not a foreign import.

What we could choose together

The City directly runs and funds police services (through the police board and council), fire, paramedics, bylaw enforcement, and the community safety plan called SafeTO. These are municipal decisions and municipal money.

Some things are provincial. Ontario sets the rules police must follow under a 2019 law, and funds a new watchdog — the Inspectorate of Policing — which took in 505 complaints in its first nine months and issued zero formal enforcement actions, too new to judge yet either way.¹² The province also funds hospital-side fixes for the paramedic problem, including nurses dedicated to receiving ambulance patients faster, and cost-shares gun-violence-prevention grants with the city.

Some things are federal. The Criminal Code and gun laws are written in Ottawa. Two federal grants pay for most of Toronto’s youth violence-prevention work — $16.6 million since 2023 — and both were set to run out by the end of March 2026, before Ottawa said it intended to renew one, without yet locking in money beyond short-term extensions.¹³

None of these programs — the paramedic staffing plan, the police budget, the violence-prevention grants — has been checked by an outside evaluator yet. Most success numbers so far come from the same government running the program.

Sources & receipts

1. Zero-ambulance episodes rose from 29 (2019) to more than 1,200 (2023) — Toronto Auditor General, paramedic services report.
2. 234 ambulances citywide, only 126 scheduled on a typical day (46% idle) — Toronto Auditor General, paramedic services report.
3. Average paramedic call took 2 hours; 71 minutes (60%) spent inside the hospital — Toronto Auditor General, paramedic services report.
4. Cardiac-arrest and highest-acuity response times up 6% and 14% respectively (2019– 2023); overall targets still met about 80% of the time — Toronto Auditor General, paramedic services report.
5. 2019 police response times of 19 and 50 minutes for the two most urgent call types, vs. a 6-minute target set by the police board in 1995 — Toronto Auditor General.
6. 2026 Toronto police budget $1.43B, up $93.8M (7.0%), funding 143 net new uniform officers, approved by the Police Service Board December 10, 2025 — City of Toronto BudgetTO materials.
7. Study of 20 Canadian cities found no consistent link between police spending and crime rates — Canadian Public Policy, reported via CBC and the MAP Centre for Urban Health Solutions.
8. 2024 shootings up 33.6%, gun deaths up 48.3%, the worst year in over a decade — Toronto Police Service and Statistics Canada.
9. Youth aged 12–29 were 58% of those involved in shootings vs. 23% of the population; 46% of incidents occurred in areas holding 22% of the population — City of Toronto, SafeTO 2025 update.
10. Scotland: weapon-carrying down 69% (2005–2016); sharp-object-assault hospital admissions down 63% (2008–2015) — Scottish Violence Reduction Unit materials and academic case study.
11. Toronto Community Crisis Service resolved 78% of transferred 911 mental-health calls without police involvement since its 2022 launch — City of Toronto, SafeTO 2025 update.
12. Ontario’s Inspectorate of Policing received 505 complaints and issued zero formal enforcement actions in its first nine months — Inspectorate of Policing Ontario.
13. $16.6 million in federal youth violence-prevention grants (2023–March 2026), both funding streams facing expiry, renewal of one only anticipated — City of Toronto Budget Briefing Note; Public Safety Canada.

This explainer went through an independent verification pass before publication (fact-check against primary sources, claim by claim). The internal verification record has been removed from this public page; the sourced facts and figures above are unchanged by that removal.