Average time on hold for 911 was over 6 minutes in Toronto one day last year

Five minutes felt like an eternity for Brett House.

That's how long House says he was on hold waiting for a 911 operator to answer his call when he came across a person having a mental and physical health crisis on the street in Toronto last fall.

"I was expecting an immediate pickup," he said.

The five minutes House says he was on hold was actually below the average wait time for an emergency call to be answered by Toronto police's 911 communication centre that day. Oct. 30 had the longest average wait time of 2022, with emergency callers waiting on hold for an average of six minutes and 28 seconds.

"I never would have anticipated there was an average wait time," House said. "I didn't think that was a concept applied to 911."

More than a year 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. Internal police documents from a six-month period in 2021 showed there were sometimes fewer than 10 operators answering 911 calls in the city of roughly 2.8 million people — with monthly average wait times of up to 33 seconds and the longest wait times as high as 10 minutes.

Now, service reports for 2022 obtained through a municipal Freedom of Information request show wait times for 911 calls only got worse last year. Monthly average wait times went up for each of the six months compared with 2021, sometimes doubling year-to-year — or, in the case of July, growing five times longer, from just 19 seconds in 2021 to an average wait of one minute in 2022.

"There is a real problem here," House said. "This is a canary in the coal mine of an increasing erosion of our public services." 

There is no provincial oversight or legislation that sets standards for emergency call-answering times in Ontario. But the Toronto Police Service strives to meet a voluntary National Emergency Number Association minimum standard of answering 90 per cent of all 911 calls within 15 seconds.

In 2022, Toronto met that standard for only 11 days, and the overall average wait time for a 911 call to be answered was more than double the standard — at 38 seconds. There were also 55 days when the average wait on hold for 911 service was between one and two minutes, compared with just five days in 2021 when the wait for an operator was that long.

An audit of the 911 communication centre by Toronto's auditor general last June found that call volume and staffing problems were at the heart of call answering delays and that the service needed to hire more operators.

The report made 26 recommendations, including establishing new minimum staffing requirements, developing data systems to better understand and improve performance, creating public awareness campaigns about when to call 911 and establishing a 911 levy to help modernize the city's emergency services.

CBC Toronto requested an interview with Toronto police Chief Myron Demkiw or someone from the 911 communication centre but was told the service didn't have anyone available to speak on 911 wait times last week due to March break.

In an email statement, a Toronto police spokesperson said the service is taking action to address the auditor general's recommendations for 911.