Mayor Valérie Plante asked the comptroller general to “accompany” the firefighters of Montreal to understand why a moratorium was put in place on the application of the regulations on emergency exits from buildings as of 2018.
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“We have asked the Comptroller General of the City of Montreal to accompany the Montreal Fire Safety Service (SIM) to clarify the situation,” wrote Ms.me Early afternoon crash on Twitter.
A few hours later, the president of the city’s executive committee confirmed this news.
“We find it important to be accompanied by the Comptroller General to be able to fully understand where the times are when there could have been breaches, if there were any,” said Dominique Ollivier.
Mme Plante assured that she wanted to shed light on this situation. “We too when we had this information [lundi]that worried us a lot, ”she said in the morning during the city council.
A nebulous lifting of the moratorium
According to what the Globe and Mail Monday, the SIM would have ended a moratorium on the application of regulations on emergency exits from buildings in the days following the fire of a heritage building in Old Montreal.
According to documents obtained by the media, this suspension had prevented the examination of the security of this building, whose fire killed seven people and injured nine on March 16.
However, the assistant director at the Service Center – Expertise and prevention development of the SIM indicated that the lifting of the moratorium is still in progress.
“We were in the process of lifting the moratorium in 2022. We are still in the process of lifting it. We accelerated certain things in March-April,” admitted Chantal Bibeau.
However, in the morning, the mayor of Montreal said that the moratorium had been lifted in 2021. This information would have been sent to her after calls made to the senior management of the SIM following the revelations of the day before.
This moratorium had been requested “after the DPCP had demanded from the SIM that certain inspections did not allow to have sufficient proof in progress”, had also explained the mayor.
For his part, the civil security coordinator and director of the SIM, Robert Liebmann, recalled that the moratorium only concerned “certain aspects of very complex files with regard to legal proceedings”.
“It’s the criminal proceedings that we suspended while we tried to raise our level of expertise,” he said.
For opposition leader Aref Salem, the situation is “really serious”. “I am still worried. I am not satisfied with the answers that have been given,” he said.