Owner in Place Youville fire sues city
The owner in the fatal Place Youville fire is suing the city for $7.5 million over claims that he faced too‑stringent requirements for upgrading the heritage property and that they didn’t send enough firefighters. Families of the victims are suing the owner over the building’s lack of fire safety measures, so I suppose he’s trying to balance his books.
The city is also included in a lawsuit from a family that’s alleging negligence.
Ephraim 13:27 on 2023-09-16 Permalink
You would think that he sort of proved the point of requiring the stringent requirements. I wonder who will represent him in court, isn’t his licence pulled?
Meezly 15:37 on 2023-09-16 Permalink
Various reputable journalists and accounts by former tenants have shown that Émile B*** engaged in shady landlord practices and tactics, fraudulent behaviours, ie. tax evasion, etc. And he still has the gall to sue the city. Has he even expressed any remorse? Could he really be this astonishingly narcissistic?
steph 17:05 on 2023-09-16 Permalink
His law licence was pulled in June 2021 https://www.barreau.qc.ca/media/wozkdfpz/avis-limitation-emile-haim-benamor.pdf
Kate 19:51 on 2023-09-16 Permalink
Meezly, I don’t want his full name on my blog, for googling/legal reasons, hence the asterisks.
H. John 04:38 on 2023-09-17 Permalink
@Ephraim. I don’t understand your question: “I wonder who will represent him in court, isn’t his licence pulled?”
His licence wasn’t pulled (as is clear from reading the notice linked to by steph); it was limited, or as The Gazette wrote “the Barreau du Québec delivered a decision that “provisionally limited his right to practise as a lawyer by prohibiting him from practising in the field of tax law.””
You don’t need a licence to be represented, and you don’t need one to represent yourself.
But beyond that, the article states he’s being represented by two lawyers from Gowling WLG, a very large multinational firm: “la poursuite, rédigée par les avocats Charles Daviault et Mathieu Papineau, du cabinet Gowling.”
Ephraim 11:59 on 2023-09-17 Permalink
Yes, you can represent yourself, but you are usually foolish in doing so. But his law licence is very specific in it’s scope. Also, if the building was his is different than if the building was owned by his corporation. And of course, who owned the corporation.
But in his case, you would have expected any reputable lawyer to tell him NOT to sue (but to still fight the lawsuits), because it sort of proves the point that you knew about it and you made the decision to not conform with the law and do the require upgrades. Which of course compounds the crime. It’s one thing to be ignorant of the needs of these safety upgrades, it’s another to know and not do them. The only reason that I can think of any lawyer agreeing to represent him is enriching themselves, because I can’t really see a world where he is found not guilty, even in the best of cases he will still be found partially guilty and unless you of course, it increases the bill.
And when you need to do upgrades to a building, there are calculations at the TAL to recover the costs. Okay, the calculations suck, especially those related to a roof, because the roof needs to be replaced more often than the depreciation at the TAL is over. But still, in the end, the great part of the cost is covered by the tenants. But of course, he wanted to profit from running it illegally as an AirBnB and therefore not have tenants. But also to run at the cheapest of costs even if knowingly endangering the lives of people.
The only bright spot he may see is that the fire department calling it arson. Of course, that still doesn’t exonerate him from ensuring that the building was safe and in particular the death of the girls in the rooms with no windows. (The only rooms allowed to be built without a window in Montreal are bathrooms and kitchens, from my understanding of the law.)