Lack of transparency concerns official

Fire inspection reports shared with landlords, but not tenants

A Toronto city councillor is “concerned” by the lack of transparency around fire inspections and is looking for answers.

Councillor Josh Matlow plans to ask the fire chief to prepare a presentation on the topic for the next meeting of council’s Tenant Issues Committee in the fall. Matlow said he hopes to learn more about why inspection reports are not publicly available.

The Ward 22 councillor said his office has fielded several emails from tenants in the wake of the recent Grenfell Tower fire — which killed at least 79 people in England earlier this month — wondering about the safety of their own highrise buildings.

“Obviously when you see a story like what happened in London, it’s completely reasonable to ask those questions,” he said. “When those answers aren’t readily available to you, it doesn’t instill confidence. And I think tenants should have the ability to be able to have access to basic information that demonstrates that their building is safe.”

Matlow recently pushed for a bylaw that would require results of inspections for problems such as waste and pests to be publicly posted in lobbies.

“Certainly my understanding is that buildings in Toronto are far safer than the building that was affected in London,” he said. “That being said though, I think we need to get more information out into the public domain, given that 50 per cent of Torontonians are tenants and a large number of those residents live in highrise buildings.”

Metro reported Wednesday on a Toronto tenant who has spent more than a year trying to track down the results of two fire inspections in his own building, only to be told he had to make an onerous Freedom of Information request.

Toronto deputy fire chief Jim Jessop said residents could learn whether their building is up to code over the phone and that any risk to public safety would be immediately addressed. If the risk was too great, the building would be shut down.

He added that a publicly accessible database of fire inspection reports is “just something we’ve never done.”

“If there was any risk to the apartment building, we have a statutory duty to take all reasonable measures to protect the tenants, which we do every day,” he said.

A city spokesperson confirmed fire-- inspection reports are subject to provincial privacy legislation and the way to get them is to make a Freedom of Information request.

IT consultant Mark Richardson said he and other open-data advocates have been trying for years to get more information from Toronto Fire Services.

“There’s an over-read of the privacy legislation in a lot of cases,” he said. “It’s a great excuse to kick the can.”

Richardson said inspection reports performed by Toronto Public Health for restaurants, salons and spas are all publicly available online, under the DineSafe and BodySafe programs.

“They’ve already got an existing model,” he said. “It’s a different city department, but as far as I’m concerned, if you die of botulism or your apartment burns down, you’re still dead at the end of it.”