Fact check · Unsubstantiated
Bradford says Toronto loses trained officers to rival forces. The service's budget blames retirement.
In the video announcing his 1,000-officer pledge, Bradford said Toronto trains officers and then loses them "to forces that aren't running on empty." Toronto Police Service budget documents for two consecutive years attribute rising departures to something else entirely, and mention other police services not once.
A safe city isn't built by asking people to do more with less. My plan will hire 1,000 more police officers to serve our communities and back up existing officers.
Transcript, from Whisper transcription of the clip's audio, excerpted
[...] A thousand more officers means more backup arrives faster when you call for it. It means shifts that let officers go home to their families. It gives officers time to get to know the neighbourhood [...] walking it on foot instead of racing from call to call in a car. And it means that the best people stay here with the Toronto Police Service[s], because right now we train officers and then we lose them to forces that aren't running on empty.
Toronto Police’s own budget blames a retirement bulge
Bradford closed his 1,000-officer announcement with a cause: Toronto trains officers and better-staffed forces take them, in his words “we lose them to forces that aren’t running on empty.”
Toronto Police Service budget documents explain the same trend differently. From the 2025 budget notes:
“Annual separations, which have been around 200, are expected to increase steadily… This trend stems from hiring freezes in the late 1980s and early 1990s, leading to large cohorts of officers, hired in the mid-1990s, now approaching retirement age in the late 2020s.”
The 2026 notes agree: by 2029, 21% of the uniform workforce and 84% of senior officers will be eligible to retire. A pension bulge, thirty years in the making.
“Other police services” appears nowhere in two years of budget documents
We searched both years’ notes for any version of his mechanism: other services, lateral transfers, competing forces, poaching. Zero mentions.
The closest thing, identical in both years, is one generic risk line: “Labour conditions need to be competitive to attract and retain members.” That is a statement about pay. It stops a long way short of finding that trained officers are leaving for rivals.
The numbers lean against him
| Historical separations | ~200 per year |
| Projected, 2025 | 210 |
| Projected, 2026 | 217 |
| 2025 actual | Below forecast. The 2026 budget funds 29 extra hires “due to fewer separations” |
An exodus should be accelerating. This came in under forecast.
Composition cuts the same way. Nearly 25% of uniform members have under five years’ service, and 37% under ten. His phrasing, “we train officers and then we lose them,” describes the newly trained walking out. The force is made of the newly trained. The leavers are the mid-1990s cohort, aging out.
Where he’s right
“It’s more calls” is confirmed by the service itself. The 2026 risk register states: “Call volume and caseload are increasing faster than resourcing.”
Regional recruiting is genuinely harder too, and Toronto competes for candidates with every force in the GTA. “Recruiting is difficult” would have stood on solid ground. The claim he made was narrower and stronger, and that is the part without support.
One dataset would settle it
TPS separates roughly 210 to 217 officers a year. Someone knows the split: retirements, resignations, and resignations to other police services. It is not in the public documents.
If the campaign has that breakdown, publishing it moves this rating immediately. If it doesn’t, the claim was made without it.
The ruling
Attrition is real and rising, on the curve TPS forecast years ago, for the reason TPS states: retirement. The mechanism Bradford asserts appears nowhere in the two most detailed public documents on police staffing, and no published data shows where leavers actually go. That cuts both ways: we cannot disprove it either.
A claim made this confidently, as the closing argument for a $143-million-a-year commitment, should rest on something a voter can check. This one rests on nothing published.
Unsubstantiated.
Sources
- Post by @BradMBradford, 23 July 2026 (96-second announcement video)
- BudgetTO 2026 Budget Notes: Toronto Police Service
- BudgetTO 2025 Budget Notes: Toronto Police Service
- Brad Bradford vows to hire 1,000 police officers over 4 years if elected
- Toronto mayoral hopeful pitches hiring 1,000 new police officers
- Are Toronto-area police forces finding it harder to recruit after years of turbulence?
- Toronto Police Service's Multi-Year Hiring Plan and the Costly Budget Implications