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christie blatchford

Peter Crawshaw's mother, Elizabeth, doesn't remember the fire last January at the Muskoka Heights Retirement Home in Orillia that took the lives of four fellow residents and nearly killed her, too.

She did remember for a short time, and when anyone asked would just murmur, "Terrible," but now Mr. Crawshaw says, "She doesn't know. It's a blessing in disguise."

For 87-year-old Mrs. Crawshaw, it may be a mercy, but she isn't the only one with a failing memory on the subject: Ontario's frail elderly have been dying in fires at residences called "care occupancies" for almost three decades and still the government won't order in the one sure cure - automatic sprinklers in older facilities.

With virtually every fire official in the province screaming for change, the only explanation that makes sense is what Oakville Fire Chief Richard Boyes, who is also the president of the Ontario Association of Fire Chiefs, calls "a failure of political will.

"What you have to look at is that the province has passed a number of other public safety laws," he said in a recent interview. "What makes this so much different? Why not pass one more law? The political will doesn't seem to be there, because it's the right thing to do."

Three coroner's inquests into such fires have recommended successive governments change the building code to make automatic sprinklers in residents' rooms mandatory and retroactive in older facilities. They are already required in new ones and have been since 1997.

Yet when Chief Patrick Burke, the Office of the Ontario Fire Marshall, and Chief Boyes raised the subject with Ontario Community Safety and Correctional Services Minister Rick Bartolucci two years ago, Chief Burke was directed to study the matter some more, and find out how many care occupancies in Ontario are unprotected and get a cost estimate.

He expects to have a report to the minister this fall.

Chief Burke won't comment on the minister's request except to say "that if I was to subjectively impose my view of the world, the whole regulatory process would sort of disintegrate."

That process is at best opaque, as I discovered in examining one recent case.

On May 14 last year, after a close call at Cavendish Manor in Niagara Falls that saw firefighters rescue 11 elderly residents, Deputy Chief Jim Jessop was galvanized to use the department's discretionary power under the Fire Protection and Prevention Act.

The department conducted surprise nighttime inspections of area retirement and nursing homes and issued separate orders to five of them, requiring them to install sprinklers or boost nighttime staffing levels.

The first order, against Cavendish Manor, was upheld by the fire marshal's office, but the four remaining ones were overturned - ironically, because the orders Niagara Falls made were the same ones the fire marshal's office had itself issued for Cavendish after the fire.

The department appealed that bewildering decision to what's called the Ontario Fire Commission, a supposedly independent body whose members are appointed by the province and paid between $627 a day and $398 a day.

The members are deliberately chosen from four major groups - users, or those from the industry side; general interest members, or ordinary citizens with an expertise in fire safety; those from the fire services (though no active firefighter may serve); and those from the environmental sector.

This mix, the commission's website says, is to ensure it can draw from "a broad range of skills and knowledge."

Yet when Deputy Chief Jessop showed up to testify at a hearing at a suburban Holiday Inn last month, he was unaware that the three members of the panel were drawn from the industry side.

This hearing was an appeal of the rescinding of the Niagara Falls order that a small residence called Chippewa Place either up its staffing at night or install sprinklers.

Commission chairman Bill Mardimae, the hearing chair, 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., which also manages a handful of retirement homes in the province, including at least one older residence in Picton, Ont., which doesn't have sprinklers.

Mr. Mardimae flatly refused to speak to me, by phone and when I showed up at his Thornhill office, so all communication with him was via e-mail through Carrie Ng, the secretary of the commission.

Ms. Ng at first said Mr. Mardimae "has never worked for or been a consultant to Assured Care Consulting," but when asked why Assured's website listed him as part of its team and why Assured's president, Robert Berg, told The Globe in an Oct. 6 phone interview that "We do sometimes work together," she provided clarification the next day.

Mr. Mardimae's company, she said, "provides project management," while Mr. Berg's "operational management services" to seniors' home owners, and "there is an overlap period … during which York and Assured interface …"

In any case, Mr. Mardimae chose as his panel mates that day Tammy O'Neill, a retired property manager from the "user" side, and Steven Weinrieb, a property manager and board member of the Greater Toronto Apartment Association.

The panel had no "fire services" representative; indeed, two of four positions on the commission reserved for the fire services remain vacant, one since 2007.

I attended the hearing, and have a transcript of the proceeding. I have also covered dozens of criminal trials, and probably a dozen quasi-judicial hearings comparable to the fire commission.

And in my inexpert but experienced view, the only information that could be remotely described as evidence - and there was a damning amount of it - came from Deputy Chief Jessop.

The owner of Chippewa Place, Marc Budic, also "testified," or more accurately spoke a time. In brief questioning afterward, Mr. Budic admitted that the home still has only one staffer on at night, that not all rooms have self-closing doors, said that staff can now evacuate the home safely but admitted that the fire department hasn't been invited to verify that, and said he hadn't obtained a quote for the cost of installing sprinklers but knew that "financially, it's not viable for my building."

With uncharacteristic speed, the commission issued its decision the very next day, giving no reasons and not even making the decision contingent upon a further inspection by the fire department: Chippewa Place was good to go.

Back to Mr. Crawshaw, whose mom is still in hospital, awaiting a spot in a nursing home, eight months after her fire.

At her age, he said furiously, "You've done your duty to your country. You worked for 45 years, taxed to goddamn death. The government has its hand in your pocket until the day you die, yet they can't protect these people."

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