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cblatchford@globeandmail.com

The Niagara Falls city solicitor yesterday raised concerns about whether the local fire department would receive fair treatment at an Ontario Fire Commission hearing slated to be held at a hotel here.

"The city does have concerns about how fair this proceeding will be," Ken Beaman told commission chairman Bill Mardimae after Mr. Mardimae posed the standard opening question to the room: "Is there anyone present who believes any member of the commission is in conflict and should not hear the appeal?"

Mr. Beaman referred to "published reports" in The Globe and Mail earlier this month about the one-sided makeup of the three-member panel, all of whom hail from the housing or health-care sector, and Mr. Mardimae's background as a health-care consultant.

"I don't have instructions to allege bias," Mr. Beaman said. "I don't think I have grounds to allege formal legal bias. But I am rather surprised at [seeing] the same panel" that abruptly dismissed a similar Niagara Falls appeal recently.

In the end, Mr. Mardimae asked Mr. Beaman to put his concerns in writing and the hearing was adjourned.

Until recently, not many people knew anything about the fire commission, and it appears its members, appointed by the provincial government and paid between $398 and $627 a day, liked it that way.

Mr. Mardimae won't speak directly to reporters, and insists that those with questions for him or other members put them through the commission's secretary, Carrie Ng. He has also refused to allow photographers or TV cameras inside the hearing room, and yesterday blasted a Globe photographer who, while standing outside the room, had his camera pointed inside.

This level of opaqueness in a public body whose members are publicly appointed and paid is unusual in the modern world, where demands for transparency and accountability are on the rise.

And it's not as though the commission handles inconsequential issues - it can confirm, amend or rescind orders issued by the province's fire marshal, which can do the same things to orders issued by any of Ontario's fire departments.

In other words, what's often at stake is nothing less than fire safety.

For about 18 months, since a major fire at a Niagara-area retirement home without automatic sprinklers in which frail residents had to be carried to safety by firefighters on ladders, the Niagara department has been leading the fight to protect seniors who live in a variety of "care occupancies" in older facilities.

Automatic sprinklers are universally agreed to offer the best protection, in that they not only put out fires quickly but also reduce the amount of toxic smoke produced by modern materials. Virtually every senior fire official in the country is a fierce advocate for sprinklers.

And they have been mandatory in new buildings since 1997, when the building code was changed after a coroner's inquest into a 1995 fire at Meadowcroft Place home in Mississauga, which killed eight seniors, recommended sprinklers be made mandatory and retroactive.

But although that inquest - and two others - recommended sprinklers also be mandatory in older facilities, successive governments at Queen's Park have failed to change the legislation to require them.

So, after the May, 2008, fire at Cavendish Manor, which Niagara Deputy Fire Chief Jim Jessop considered a wakeup call, the department conducted surprise night-time inspections of facilities in its area, and issued orders against five homes.

The first order, against Cavendish, was upheld by the fire marshal, and the home didn't appeal to the fire commission, but installed sprinklers.

But the fire marshal overturned the remaining four orders.

Niagara appealed the first of those decisions earlier this month before the identical panel of the commission that appeared yesterday - Tammy O'Neill, a retired property manager; Steven Weinrieb, a property manager and board member of the Greater Toronto Apartment Association; and Mr. Mardimae, who as commission chair gets to pick the panel members.

Yesterday, Niagara was appealing the second overturned order, this against Oakwood Park Lodge, a long-term care facility accredited by the province's Health Ministry, with residents' nursing care and programming paid for by the ministry.

Mr. Mardimae is a veteran design and building consultant in the health-care business, president of York Health Care Developments Inc. and affiliated with Assured Care Consulting Inc., whose website lists him as part of its "network team." Assured manages a handful of retirement homes in Ontario, including at least one older residence in Picton, Ont., that doesn't have sprinklers.

Earlier this month, he told The Globe, via secretary Ng, that he "was not in a position of conflict of interest," denied that he had ever worked for or been a consultant with Assured Care, and clarified only afterward that the two firms sometimes "interface" on projects where they are separately employed.

Although commission members are deliberately chosen from four groups - the industry sector, general interest, the environmental field and the fire safety side - the panels apparently don't have to reflect a similar mix.

"It surprises the city that the commission would choose to send the same panel to deal with the same issues," Mr. Beaman said yesterday. "It surprises the city that there's no one from the fire side ... it's difficult to be convinced we're dealing with an expert tribunal when there's no one expert in fire safety on the panel."

And in fact, two of four positions reserved for fire services on the commission remain vacant.

In a bit of irony, the lawyer representing Oakwood Park yesterday said he intends to challenge the credentials of Deputy Chief Jessop as Niagara's expert witness. "He is a witness who has turned himself into an advocate," Jim Macdonald told Mr. Mardimae. "He should not be qualified as an expert."

How rich is that? The same could be said of every firefighter in this province who has gone into the blackened remains of a nursing home and found the aged bodies of those least able to protect themselves.