Mayor on the fire inspection moratorium
Mayor Plante says that although she has confirmed that there was a moratorium on exit route inspections by the fire department in 2018, as revealed Monday in the Globe & Mail, she says it was lifted in 2021 and not in a hurry after the fatal Place Youville fire in March, as was alleged by the Toronto paper.
What’s interesting is that the moratorium began because the DPCP (the Crown prosecutor’s office) asked the fire department to stop doing the inspections because they seldom resulted in enough evidence to lead to a conviction in court. I don’t think this is why most members of the public would want the fire department to make exit inspections. I don’t think we’d feel it was wasted time.
Blork 17:37 on 2023-05-16 Permalink
“…the DPCP (the Crown prosecutor’s office) asked the fire department to stop doing the inspections because they seldom resulted in enough evidence to lead to a conviction in court.”
As Kate infers, that should NOT be the reason for those inspections. If there are few convictions, that’s a sign of SUCCESS not failure! <- Seriously. What the actual f*ck are these people thinking?
It's only a sign of failure if you're an idiot administrator who sees inspections as revenue generators instead of public safety measures. Think such people might exist? Sure seems like it!
Em 09:47 on 2023-05-17 Permalink
The fire chief said yesterday that inspections did not stop. But what did stop was some of the legal actions to force compliance, especially prosecutions, when the case was complex and involved major structural change. His answers were really not clear but he seemed to say the inspectors didn’t know enough about the building code, or something.
Not sure if that’s any better, because it suggests they knew these buildings were dangerous and didn’t take meaningful action to force landlords to fix it. But I don’t think it’s a huge surprise either.