Fact check · Missing Context
Bradford praises Tory's record. The 911 wait he campaigns on peaked in Tory's last year.
We do not rate predictions, so this is not about whether history looks kindly on anyone. It is about the record being praised, measured on the one number Bradford has built more of his campaign on than any other, using the police service's own budget book.
Any list of Toronto mayors that puts John Tory at the bottom is ridiculous. History will look kindly on his steady leadership and economic focus. https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/we-asked-who-torontos-best-modern-mayor-was-heres-how-youve-answered-so-far/article_4bc84657-9966-4ab5-9a66-654e222e96ac.html
The 911 wait peaked at 23.1 minutes in Tory’s last year
John Tory was mayor from December 2014 to February 2023. Here is what happened across that period to the number Bradford cites more than any other, from the Toronto Police Service’s own 2026 budget book:
| Year | Priority 1 average response |
|---|---|
| 2010 | 12.8 minutes |
| 2023 | 23.1 minutes |
| 2024 | 17.4 minutes |
| 2025 (to 31 Oct) | 13.5 minutes |
The service’s own summary of the first half of that:
From 2010 to 2023, Priority 1 response times rose to over 23.1 minutes due to population growth, heavier workloads, and fewer officers.
The wait for the most urgent emergency calls nearly doubled, and the peak year was the year Tory left office.
Where he is right, and it is a lot
This is the part that has to be said before anything else, because it is substantial and the police service says it plainly.
The workload grew enormously. Priority 1 calls attended rose 66.2% from 2015 to 2023. Toronto’s population grew 21.2% since 2010, reaching 3.24 million, before counting 27.5 million visitors and 800,000 daily commuters.
A mayor does not set response times. Staffing runs through the police services board and the chief, arbitration sets wage costs, and provincial decisions shape the rest. Attributing a citywide operational metric to one person would be exactly the error this site exists to catch.
And the recovery is being driven by the thing Bradford advocates. The service credits “increased frontline staffing and operational improvements.” More officers on the front line is his prescription, and on this measure it is working. He is entitled to that point.
It has fallen 42% since, on the same service’s numbers
Olivia Chow took office in July 2023. The budget book records what has happened since:
In the past two years, increased frontline staffing and operational improvements have reduced average response times to 13.5 minutes, a 42% improvement over 2023.
Response times are now close to where they were in 2010, before the rise the service describes.
The staffing ratio peaked in 2018
The other half of his standard argument is officers per resident, and it moves the same way:
From 2000 to 2024, the number of residents per officer grew from around 470 to 585, peaking at 620 in 2018.
That peak, the worst ratio in the series, falls in the middle of Tory’s second term. It is expected to improve to 582 in 2025.
He built a campaign on this number
This is what makes the omission matter rather than being a technicality.
In July, announcing a pledge to hire 1,000 officers, Bradford said families “deserve to know they won’t be counting the minutes after calling 911.” We checked that pledge and found the wait had already been halved under the plan he called inadequate. He has also said that every chance Chow had to act on public safety she declined, which the record contradicted.
So the same number appears three times in his campaign. It is the reason to hire 1,000 officers. It is the evidence that Chow has failed. And it is absent from his account of the mayor on whose watch it doubled.
What this article does not rate
Not the prediction. “History will look kindly” is unfalsifiable and this site does not rate predictions.
Not whether Tory was a good mayor. That is a judgment, readers are entitled to their own, and the Star piece he was responding to is an unscientific tally of about 140 reader comments rather than a poll. His description of it was accurate: it does place Tory last.
Not causation. Nothing here says Tory caused response times to rise or that Chow caused them to fall. The police service attributes the rise to population, workload and staffing, and the recovery to frontline hiring.
What is rated is narrower and entirely his own: he praises a record as steady while omitting that the single metric he campaigns hardest on deteriorated across it and recovered after it. A reader of his post would not learn that the 911 wait he calls unacceptable peaked in the year the mayor he is defending left office.