Fire crews respond to the scene of a deadly fire in Place d'Youville in Montreal, on March 19.Andrej Ivanov/The Globe and Mail
Family members of victims of the deadly Old Montreal fire and city opposition leaders are demanding the release of a report on the fire department’s controversial, years-long moratoriums on the enforcement of safety standards uncovered by The Globe and Mail in May.
The comptroller-general’s report, commissioned by the city after The Globe’s reporting, has been in the hands of the fire department since at least October, but the city has so far declined to make it public.
“The contradictions and lack of transparency in this matter are accumulating and undermining the confidence of Montrealers in public safety,” said Abdelhaq Sari, public security spokesperson for the opposition at city hall. “This whole saga is unacceptable,” he said in a statement.
Montreal’s fire department faced intense scrutiny after The Globe found it had instituted moratoriums on the enforcement of some evacuation routes and alarm system regulations. This prevented legal proceedings against the owner of the now burned-down Old Montreal building where several safety issues were noted in multiple reports between 2009 and 2020, years before the fire killed seven people. There is no record of some of these issues being resolved.
The city has thus far declined to share the comptroller-general’s report with The Globe despite multiple requests. Spokesperson Gonzalo Nuñez instead referred The Globe to the access-to-information division, which denied the request because “its disclosure might well affect the outcome of judicial proceedings.”
Louis-Philippe Lacroix, the father of 18-year-old Charlie Lacroix, who was stuck in a windowless room and died in the blaze, has also asked for the report to be made public. “It’s 200 per cent certain that I would like to have the chance to see the report,” Mr. Lacroix said in an interview.
He said he was frustrated by the lack of transparency and apparent lack of progress nine months after the tragedy. “There is nothing that comes out of any investigation,” he said.
Annette Lefebvre, a lawyer for Randy Sears, who lost his son, Nathan, in the fire, said: “We’d like to see any documents, we have nothing. We’ve made multiple requests and all of our requests have been refused.”
The Globe’s reporting in May prompted Mayor Valérie Plante to ask the city’s comptroller-general to review the fire department’s policies. A criminal investigation into the arson is continuing and a public coroner’s inquest will resume once the police probe is completed. Mr. Lacroix and others have also filed lawsuits against the city, citing poor enforcement.
In a news conference Wednesday, Ms. Plante did not say whether the report would ever be made public. Alain Vaillancourt, who is responsible for public security in Montreal’s executive committee, said the report’s recommendations were incorporated into the fire department’s practices but did not say whether it would be made public.
Mr. Vaillancourt also said he still has confidence in Fire Chief Richard Liebmann, who made false comments in a news conference in May when addressing his departments’ moratoriums. At the time, Mr. Liebmann said that “never at any time” did the department pause evacuation-route inspections or any other type of fire inspections.
But The Globe revealed this week that some inspections had been suspended, according to an internal memo. Mr. Liebmann and Chantal Bibeau, the fire department’s deputy chief for prevention and risk management, also conceded that “construction” evacuation-route inspections, which look at factors like the layout of a building and the number of exits, were suspended during a moratorium instituted in 2018.