Toronto Emergency Services Face Critical Budget and Staffing Decisions

Toronto Fire Services logged its worst average response time in 15 years last quarter, 7 minutes and 43 seconds for Priority 1 calls across the city, well above the six-minute benchmark the service is supposed to meet. That single number is forcing a reckoning at city hall that politicians have deferred for the better part of a decade.

The pressure isn't new. But three things have converged to make inaction politically untenable heading into fall 2026: a post-COVID surge in downtown population density as condo towers fill up along the Eglinton Crosstown corridor, a paramedic workforce that Toronto Paramedic Services says is running roughly 180 positions short of what its own 2024 staffing plan called for, and a provincial government in Queen's Park that has shown little appetite for uploading any emergency-service costs from municipalities.

The Infrastructure Gap No One Wants to Fund

The physical reality is stark. Fire Station 142 on Carlton Street in Cabbagetown was built in 1962 and has never received a full structural retrofit. Station 115 in Scarborough's Malvern neighbourhood, one of the highest-call-volume districts in the city, operates with apparatus bays too narrow to accommodate the newer ladder trucks the department began purchasing in 2022. Toronto's capital budget, approved in February, earmarked $38 million for fire infrastructure over three years, a figure the Toronto Professional Fire Fighters' Association has publicly called less than half of what's required.

Paramedic Services faces a parallel crunch. Toronto Paramedic Services operates 45 deployment locations across the city, but its Offload Delay program, which tracks hours paramedic crews spend waiting outside emergency departments because hospitals can't accept patients, recorded more than 91,000 lost hours in 2025. Every hour a crew is parked outside Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre or Michael Garron Hospital is an hour it isn't available for a 911 call in Thorncliffe Park or Leslieville.

The Toronto Police Service budget conversation adds another layer of complexity. City council approved a $1.17 billion operating budget for TPS for 2026, a figure that consumed roughly 8.5 percent of the city's total operating spend. Critics on the budget committee argued that mental health calls, now comprising an estimated one in three police dispatches, could be redirected to community crisis teams at a fraction of the cost, freeing both police and paramedic resources. The city's Mobile Crisis Intervention Teams, which pair a plainclothes officer with a mental health nurse, currently operate in only 12 of the city's 158 neighbourhoods.

The Decisions That Cannot Wait Until 2027

Three specific decision points are coming before the end of the year. First, city manager Paul Johnson's office is expected to table a multi-year service delivery review in September that will recommend whether emergency dispatch should be consolidated under a single Toronto Emergency Management umbrella, a structural change that has been studied since 2019 and has never moved past the report stage.

Second, the Ontario government's review of the Fire Protection and Prevention Act is scheduled to produce recommendations by October 31. Advocates for Toronto Fire Services have been lobbying for amendments that would allow the province to set minimum staffing ratios, which would give the city cover to push back against any future council effort to trim fire personnel budgets.

Third, and most immediately, the 2027 budget process opens in November, and the Deputy City Manager's office has already signalled that emergency services will face a structural shortfall of at least $60 million unless Queen's Park agrees to adjust the Ontario Municipal Partnership Fund formula, something Ford's government has not indicated it will do.

For residents in high-growth areas like the Yonge-Eglinton node, where 14 residential towers are either under construction or permitted within 800 metres of the Eglinton and Yonge intersection, the arithmetic is simple: more people, the same number of fire stations, fewer paramedics per capita than the city had in 2016. What city council decides to do about that gap between now and December will determine what kind of city Toronto actually is when someone dials 911.