Toronto 911 operator says 'people are being hurt' by being put on hold for 2-10 minutes

A baby not breathing, a drowning and a person suffering from a gunshot wound.

Those are all examples of emergencies where callers waited on hold for longer than two minutes before a Toronto 911 operator said they were able to answer the call.

"Everything that we do at our job as call-takers is about seconds," the operator said. "People are being hurt, and they don't know they're not getting the help that they need."

CBC News is not identifying the 911 operator because they're not authorized to talk about their work at the Toronto Police Service's 911 communication centre, which answers all emergency calls for the city. 

Callers being put on hold when trying to report an emergency was a problem even before COVID-19. Two years before the pandemic, Toronto police were working to address wait times by hiring and training more operators to meet increased demand for 911.

Now internal documents obtained by CBC News show how long wait times are more than one-offs in Canada's largest city. Reports, emails and snapshots of Toronto's 911 call queue paint a picture of an emergency service struggling to retain staff amid burnout-fuelled shortages.

The staffing issues mean there are sometimes fewer than 10 operators answering 911 calls for a city of nearly three million people, leading to average longest wait times ranging from two to 10 minutes.

"We're not fulfilling our duty to the public," said the 911 operator. "We all took this job to help people, we all took this job to answer your call, to be there — and we can't do it."

The manager of Toronto's 911 communication centre told CBC News the service is safe and fulfilling its duty to the public despite any staffing challenges. 

"There's always going to be those peaks in call volume that create wait time — it's inevitable," said Kerry Murray-Bates. "Financially or logistically, it's just not possible to staff [for] a van attack every day. It doesn't make sense."

The communication centre received just under 900 emergency calls in the roughly two hours around the April 2018 Toronto van attack, which killed 10 people and injured 16 others. By comparison, in the same time period a day earlier, the call centre received 400 calls, said Murray-Bates. 

The team uses historical data to best "match our workforce to our workflow," she said, and continues to train and recruit new staff to fill vacancies.

Since June 2021, the 911 operator captured nearly 250 snapshots of 911 wait times from 45 different days on the job. The longest wait time among the queue board photos shared with CBC News was six minutes and 51 seconds, with 62 people waiting on hold and nine operators taking calls. 

The operator captured 140 queue board images where the longest wait time was over two minutes in length, 43 where it was over three minutes and 13 where it was over four minutes long — all over different days of the week and times of the day.