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Safety & Emergency Readiness

Published 2026-07-30 · part of the research library.

When you call 911 in Toronto, one of three services answers: police, fire, or paramedics. Each is under strain, but not the same way — paramedics are stretched by hospital handoff delays, police budgets are rising while the link to crime rates stays unclear, and gun violence had its worst year in over a decade in 2024. This page covers policing, fire and paramedic response, the city’s community safety and well-being plan, bylaw enforcement, and youth violence prevention.

Where things stand

  1. 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. The city has 234 ambulances, but on a typical day only 126 are staffed and running.
  2. In 2023, a paramedic crew spent two hours on average handling a call — and 71 of those minutes (60%) were spent waiting inside a hospital to hand off the patient. For the most urgent calls, 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.
  3. Toronto’s 2026 police budget is $1.43 billion, up $93.8 million (7.0%), funding 143 net new officers, approved by the Police Service Board on December 10, 2025. A peer-reviewed study of 20 Canadian cities, including Toronto, found no consistent link between rising police spending and falling crime rates.
  4. 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. 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.
  5. Toronto’s 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, responding to more than 25,000 calls in that time.
  6. 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.
  7. Toronto’s Property Standards Bylaw sets fines of $1,000 for ignoring an enforcement order and $750 for a standard violation. RentSafeTO, the city’s rental apartment-building inspection program, covers buildings of three or more storeys and ten or more units, but not condos, townhomes, or units inside private homes.
  8. Ontario’s new police watchdog, the Inspectorate of Policing, received 505 complaints and issued zero formal enforcement actions in its first nine months — likely too soon to judge either way, but a live starting data point.

What the city controls vs. what needs the province

The city can act on directly: 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 — as of April 2025, over 90% of the 26 Phase-1 actions in that 10-year plan were complete or in progress.

Needs the province: Ontario sets the rules police must follow under a 2019 law, and funds the new Inspectorate of Policing watchdog described above; the province also funds hospital-side fixes for the paramedic handoff problem, and cost-shares gun-violence-prevention grants with the city.

Needs the federal government: the Criminal Code and gun laws are written in Ottawa. Federal grants pay for most of Toronto’s youth violence-prevention work, as described above. Institutional testimony to a House of Commons committee reported that 86% of successfully traced crime handguns in Toronto in 2021 were sourced in the United States.

Two figures are deliberately left out of this page as contested or unaudited rather than treated as gaps: the City’s own claimed 43%/35% drop in shootings for 2025 (which conflicts with the independently sourced 2024 spike above, and is not yet reconciled by any source reviewed) and the province’s claimed 65% reduction in hospital offload time since October 2022 (government communications, not an audited dataset). Neither is asserted as fact on this page for that reason.

Go deeper

How this connects to the election

Most of the levers described above sit directly with Toronto’s city council, mayor, and police board; the province and federal government control others, as noted above. A resident who wants to ask a candidate for city council or mayor what they would do about any of these levers can use the neutral, non-partisan candidate question bank for this category — every question there works identically for any candidate, any party. This page does not endorse, score, or rank any candidate or party, and does not direct a reader to any organization or campaign.

Sources & receipts

  1. Toronto Paramedic Services - Rising Response Times Caused by Staffing Challenges and Pressures in the Healthcare System; Toronto Paramedic Services - Rising Response Times Caused by Staffing Challenges and Pressures in the Healthcare System (fact 1).
  2. Toronto Paramedic Services - Rising Response Times Caused by Staffing Challenges and Pressures in the Healthcare System; Toronto Paramedic Services - Rising Response Times Caused by Staffing Challenges and Pressures in the Healthcare System (fact 2).
  3. 2026 Toronto police operating budget — BudgetTO documents; 20-city policing study via the community safety & policing backgrounder above (fact 3).
  4. 2024 Toronto Police Service Chief's Annual Report; 2024 Toronto Police Service Chief's Annual Report; Firearms and violent crime in Canada, 2024 (fact 4).
  5. 2025 Update on SafeTO Implementation (fact 5).
  6. 2026 Budget Briefing Note: Impact of Federal Funding Loss and New and Enhanced Funding to Support Youth; 2026 Budget Briefing Note: Impact of Federal Funding Loss and New and Enhanced Funding to Support Youth (fact 6).
  7. Property Standards; Property Standards (fact 7).
  8. On the Road to Excellence: Annual Report of the Inspector General of Policing 2024 (fact 8).
  9. 2025 Update on SafeTO Implementation (SafeTO Phase 1 progress, “what the city controls”).
  10. A Path Forward: Reducing Gun and Gang Violence in Canada (traced-handgun sourcing, “needs the federal government”).