By appealing to the Comptroller General of the City of Montreal, Mayor Valérie Plante expects to obtain answers concerning the impact that the decision of the Montreal Fire Department (SIM) to put certain files on hold may have had. judicialized in terms of building security. In the same breath, she assures us that she has full confidence in the firefighters and the management of the SIM.
Several questions still remain unanswered about the real impact of the moratorium imposed by the SIM, in 2018, on the follow-up of certain inspection files related to building safety standards.
“I want to understand when the decision was made. What does it do ? “, said the mayor, Wednesday, during a press briefing at City Hall. “We decided to review a process, a strategy. Did we take the right approach? Is it taking too long? Should we go faster? Do we need to put additional resources? Everything is on the table because for me, there is no question of skimping on the safety of citizens in Montreal. »
Monday, The Globe and Mail reported that in the days following the fire in the building in Old Montreal that killed seven people last March, the SIM would have discreetly lifted the moratorium in place since 2018 on investigations into the evacuation routes of buildings. According to the daily, this moratorium would have been decreed due to a lack of staff training. Several reports of non-compliance made by an inspector in this building would not have been followed up.
Valérie Plante called the elements raised in the article “disturbing”. Although she says she has complete confidence in the SIM, she believes that the city’s comptroller general, Me Alain Bond, will be able to accompany the SIM and the City in order to paint a complete portrait of the situation.
On Tuesday, the director of the SIM, Richard Liebmann, assured that the pace of fire prevention inspections in buildings had never slowed down, but that in 2018, the SIM had decided to suspend the procedures in the case of more legal cases. complex given the difficulty for the SIM to win its case before the courts in cases of recalcitrant owners. A new strategy began to be applied gradually for these files, he said.
The mayor had not been informed of the 2018 moratorium, but she stressed that the SIM made its own decisions and that the file was very technical. “If we had put a moratorium on the number of inspections, I think we would be completely elsewhere. I don’t want to minimize [la situation]but it is important for me to say that the SIM makes decisions, like the SPVM [Service de police de la Ville de Montréal]. Not every file ends up on the mayor’s desk,” she said.