When Mike McDerment called 911 after spotting a car on fire on a Toronto highway this September, he was put on hold. He watched the time tick by for more than four minutes without an operator picking up.
“This is 911,” he said in an interview with CBC Toronto. “I’m reporting something that doesn’t look good, but there are emergencies where certainly every second counts.”
After waiting more than four minutes and 23 seconds, McDerment hung up — he said he assumed someone else had called in the car and worried he was “clogging up the lines.”
That day, Sept. 22, the average wait on hold for an emergency call to be answered by Toronto police’s 911 communication centre was two minutes and 44 seconds. The longest wait time a caller faced was 10 minutes and 14 seconds, according to an internal service report.
“I would expect a higher standard,” said McDerment. “At the end of the day it’s a public safety measure of sorts. It’s an indication of how well we’re all being looked after.”
Nearly two years ago, a CBC Toronto investigation revealed how lengthy 911 wait times are more than one-offs in Canada’s largest city amid burnout-fuelled staffing shortages.
Since then, a report from Toronto’s Auditor General found that call volume and staffing problems were at the heart of call answering delays and the service needed to hire more operators.
But more than a year after releasing that report, wait times on hold for 911 in Toronto have only grown longer and are happening more frequently, according to internal records obtained through Freedom of Information requests.
Year over year, monthly service level reports for June through September show that the average 911 call answering time increased by 44 seconds over three years — from an average wait of 24 seconds in 2021 to one minute and eight seconds this year.
The longest wait time a caller faced for 911 to answer this year (through the end of September) was 12 minutes and 40 seconds on June 3.
Police, union hired third party to analyze staffing levels
CBC Toronto asked Toronto police why 911 call answering times are still getting worse, whether the service plans to increase the number of 911 operators budgeted to reduce wait times and how many positions are currently vacant at the communication centre.
The Toronto Police Service did not respond to those questions before publication. Instead, spokesperson Stephanie Sayer pointed to reports with updates on the service’s response to the auditor general’s recommendations so far.
In one such report from July, the service noted it had partnered with the Toronto Police Association on a project to review current staffing levels and shift deployment at the call centre.
Through that partnership, a third-party consulting firm was hired to do the analysis work on new minimum staffing requirements and reviewing staff levels, as recommended by the auditor general.
Mike McDerment says he expected his 911 call would be answered instantly, but instead he waited on hold for more than four minutes before hanging up on September 22. Wait times on hold for 911 in Toronto have grown longer over the last three years and are happening more frequently, according to internal reports obtained by CBC Toronto.
“Once the vendor has completed their analysis, the findings will be used by the project team to establish new staffing requirements,” said the police report. “If staffing gaps are identified, the service will follow appropriate channels to pursue any necessary increases to communication services complement.”
According to the report, that work is estimated to be completed by spring 2024, and once it’s done the project team “will look at other initiatives to support employee retention.”
Failing to meet minimum call answering standard
In the meantime, internal reports show the service is almost always failing to meet its minimum 911 call answering standard. There is no provincial oversight or legislation that sets standards for emergency call-answering times in Ontario.
But the Toronto police use the voluntary National Emergency Number Association (NENA) minimum standard of answering 90 per cent of all 911 calls within 15 seconds.
Last year the communication centre met that standard for only 11 days. This year the service failed to meet the minimum standard every day through the end of September.
CBC Toronto previously reported there were 55 days in 2022 when the average wait on hold for 911 to answer was between one and two minutes — that number nearly doubled to 100 days this year by the end of September.
On one of those days in April, a family in Etobicoke, Ont., who previously spoke to CBC Toronto waited on hold for five minutes and 23 seconds for 911 while their infant son was choking before hanging up and trying to save the child themselves.
By the time they got through to a 911 call operator on a second attempt, the child’s father had already dislodged the obstruction from his son’s throat and resuscitated him.
The average wait time for a 911 call to be answered that day, April 15, was one minute and 39 seconds, the longest wait time a caller faced was six minutes and 10 seconds, according to the monthly service report.
Mayor campaigned on improving 911 wait times
Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow pledged to improve 911 wait times during her mayoral election campaign. At the time, Chow cited an instance where she was put on hold when her elderly father had pneumonia and stopped breathing.
Last week, Chow told CBC Toronto she hopes new funding that she’s directed to Toronto Community Crisis Services (TCCS) — which aims to divert some 911 calls regarding mental health situations — will help.
“It is being expanded, and when that happens all across the city, then you will see the 911 call wait times drop,” said Chow.
In its first year, the TCCS program diverted 78 per cent of calls it received from 911 with no police involvement. But there was an unintended impact on call answering times.
To divert a call, 911 operators have to explain the TCCS process to the caller, obtain consent to pass on health information and stay on the line to exchange information with the call taker from 211 Central, which triages and dispatches calls for TCCS. All of that takes time, which led to a 400 per cent increase in the amount of time 911 call takers spent on these types of calls, according to a report from July.
“This increase in ‘talk time’ for TCCS-related calls has further impacted Communications Services ability to meet the National Emergency Number Association (N.E.N.A.) standard for answering 911 calls,” reads the report.
In an email, the mayor’s office said police and city staff are looking into a model of implied consent for the transfer from 911. The statement also said more people have been calling 211 directly over the last year and so that line “may soon overtake 911 as a primary call source for the TCCS.”
One of the auditor general’s other recommendations was a feasibility review of moving 911 to a non-police city service. That review hasn’t started yet, but conducting it has received the support of police and city council.
“The mayor believes the people of Toronto should get timely help in an emergency and we’ll work to make that happen and reduce wait times,” said the statement from Chow’s office.
Robert Stewart, a board member of the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials Canada, says 911 communication centres across the country deal with funding and staffing challenges in part because they’re not given as much attention as the first responders they dispatch.
“We’re not always noticed,” said Stewart, who is also the director of emergency communications in Brandon, Man.
“We need more paramedics to go to more calls but you also need more dispatchers and call takers to be able to take those calls.”
While steps to help support mental health and optimize shift scheduling can happen at the communication centre level, Stewart told CBC Toronto managers need funding for staff to meet minimum standards like NENA’s 90 per cent of calls answered within 15 seconds.
“The standard is the standard for a reason,” he said.
“It’s difficult to hold a centre to a standard that they can’t meet because you’re also not giving them the resources that they need in order to meet that standard.”