OPINION: We bury officers who die by violence but hide those with mental health struggles

Police leadership says it can't afford to protect injured officers. It should explain why so many are dying by suicide instead.

Published Aug 29, 2026  •  Last updated 25 minutes ago  •  4 minute read

William Woodstock was honoured by the Oshawa Generals as the hometown hero at the team's first responder night in 2019. Photo by William Woodstock / Handout

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In my last piece for the Toronto Sun, I wrote about how we carve the names of officers who die in the line of duty into stone, but keep no record of the ones who survive the call and lose the fight with what it left behind. This time, that gap isn’t an oversight. It’s starting to look deliberate.

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In the last two weeks, five police officers and one paramedic have died in Canada, including four in Ontario. No official confirmation of cause has come out, because these organizations don’t release that; word travels through conversation instead. By every account, most died by suicide, or, that operational stress injuries like PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) played a role.

I vividly remember the fall of 2022. We lost five officers in the line of duty in four months, plus one to an impaired driver on the way to work, and politicians still spoke up: bail reform, action, and an end to the violence. We felt like people had our backs. This time, in two weeks, we’ve lost six first responders to mental health injuries, and we’re still not treating it with the same seriousness. The S-word makes people uncomfortable, but that’s not why we’re not addressing it; the real reason is more troubling.

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In 2016, the province amended the Workplace Safety and Insurance Act to presume that PTSD in public safety personnel came from the job, so members could get help without months spent trying to “prove” they were struggling. In 2021, the Ontario Association of Chiefs of Police (OACP) tried to roll parts of that back. I was off on WSIB myself then, diagnosed with PTSD and fighting to get back to work, unaware of that push. I don’t want to think about what would have changed had I known.

In 2025, my own association, the Durham Regional Police Association, led by President Andrew Tummonds, bargained away benefits for members on WSIB — and Durham wasn’t alone. Their contract proposal said as much: comparable services had already traded these items away for pay and benefit increases, and Durham followed suit “to achieve the high priority items requested through our member survey.” I can’t think of anything more important than taking care of the people we ask to carry the weight of societal trauma.

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Financial protections cut

Those bargained changes cut financial protections for members hurt on the job. The old agreement topped up WSIB to your full net pay. Fair, for people we ask to run into gunfire. The new one caps that top-up at 72 months per career, not per injury, and stops members from banking vacation or sick time while they’re off, so they come back to nothing, shifting the cost onto the member right when they’re most vulnerable.

This wasn’t unique to Durham; several major Ontario services followed suit.

In June 2026, Durham’s Chief, Peter Moreira, became president of the OACP. Its first resolution under him, the only one all year, asks the province to amend the WSIB Act again, to cut benefits for all public safety personnel, citing “significant budgetary challenges for police employers.”

The OACP also wants employers to be active parties in return-to-work case management, to be able to file objections and rebuttals to a member’s injury. That’s the “prove it” mentality again: first responders recounting each horrifying call to prove an illness that’s invisible. They also want anyone who qualifies for a full pension to lose eligibility for loss-of-earnings benefits, so if you’re hurt near retirement, the service would rather see you take your OMERS pension and go rather than pay you.

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The OACP seems to think it knows better than the professionals who treat these members, all to protect taxpayer dollars. Fair enough, but shouldn’t we do more to keep people from ending up on WSIB in the first place?

Face trauma on the job

First responders know going in that they’ll face trauma. It’s the job. The ask isn’t fewer calls, it’s support strong enough to carry people through calls that would cripple anyone else. This isn’t about preventing PTSD as it will keep happening. It’s about preventing suicide, and keeping people from ever getting to the point of being off work at all.

So are we surprised that police services are trying to hide the number of suicides among their ranks? When they don’t support members at work, don’t give them real resources to get better and stay there, and don’t support them once they’re off it, when do we start pointing fingers at the source of the problem?

When we hide them in death and hide them in life, did we ever care enough to try to save them?

It’s time to stop the check-the-box solutions.

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