You Can’t Divert People From Police Into a System You’re Allowing to Lose Capacity

Across Canada, governments are telling police, paramedics and emergency departments that people experiencing mental-health and addictions-related crises should receive the right response from the right professional.

That is the right objective.

But it depends on something more fundamental: the clinical and community services receiving those people must actually have the capacity to help them.

The Canadian Press reported on October 1 that provincial and territorial health ministers are warning of serious consequences if federal agreements supporting mental-health, addictions, home and community care are not renewed. The agreements provide $4.8 billion over four years and are scheduled to end in March 2027—an annual funding change of approximately $1.2 billion if no successor funding is put in place.

The expiry of an agreement does not prove that every funded service will close. Governments may renew, replace or redesign the funding. But the uncertainty arrives while Canada is already trying to move crisis work away from emergency services and toward health and community care.

Diversion requires somewhere to divert people to

We have spent considerable time debating whether police should respond to mental-health calls. We have discussed civilian crisis teams, police-clinician partnerships, mobile outreach, specialized paramedic programs and alternative destinations to emergency departments.

These models can be valuable. But none of them works simply because a call is diverted.

A person still needs an assessment. A treatment space must be available. A clinician must have time to provide care. A referral must lead somewhere. And the person may need continuing support after the immediate crisis has passed.

If community services are full, understaffed or temporary, the crisis does not disappear. It returns to the emergency system.

Temporary funding can create permanent operational risk

Time-limited funding can be appropriate when governments are testing a new program. Programs should be evaluated before public money is renewed.

But mental-health and addictions services cannot be built as though the need ends when a funding agreement does. Once a service becomes part of a crisis pathway, uncertainty about its future becomes an operational risk for every organization relying on that pathway.

A police service may train its communications staff to redirect appropriate calls. A paramedic service may create an alternative-care pathway. A hospital may develop a community referral process. Those arrangements become fragile if the receiving program is forced to reduce staff, shorten hours, close intake or disappear altogether.

Canada cannot build permanent expectations around temporary capacity without a clear transition plan.

First responders absorb the gap

When community care cannot respond early enough, the need does not vanish. Someone calls 9-1-1.

Police officers respond to suicide risk, psychosis, self-harm, addiction and families who have reached the point where they do not know where else to turn. Paramedics respond to overdose, medical distress and repeated crises. Firefighters increasingly provide critical medical interventions. Emergency-department professionals receive the person at the other end, often while working in crowded and heavily pressured environments.

Every failure in continuity becomes somebody else’s workload. For first responders, repeated exposure to acute distress, death, near-death and frightened families also becomes part of their cumulative occupational load.

This is why stable mental-health and addictions care is not only a health-policy issue. It is also a public-safety and occupational-health issue.

Renewal should come with accountability

The answer should not be to renew funding without asking what it achieved. The federal government is right that time-limited programs should be evaluated before they are renewed or changed.

But evaluation must be transparent, timely and connected to the outcomes Canadians were promised.

What services were created or expanded? How many people received care? How long did they wait? How many remained connected to treatment? Did repeat crises, emergency-department visits and 9-1-1 contacts decrease? Did access improve in rural, remote and Indigenous communities? Did police, paramedic and emergency-department workloads change?

Those questions should be answered before the funding expires—not after services begin planning layoffs or reductions.

Build a system that can receive the handoff

Beyond Resilience Canada supports the principle of sending the right responder to the right call. Qualified clinical and community professionals can improve care while reducing unnecessary police involvement and avoidable occupational exposure for first responders.

But a handoff is only meaningful if someone is there to receive it.

Ottawa, the provinces and territories should resolve the funding uncertainty, publish the evidence from the current agreements and set measurable expectations for whatever comes next. Renewal and accountability are not competing ideas. Canada needs both.

You cannot divert people from police into a system you are allowing to lose capacity.