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

Reports show 55 days when callers waited average of 1-2 minutes for an operator

Mar 20, 2023

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.

Read more: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/toronto-911-wait-times-worse-last-year-1.6782375