Wednesday December 23rd marks the 31st anniversary of the terrible fire at Toronto’s Rupert Hotel.
This past November the City of Toronto took steps to come up with new regulations that would be part of a comprehensive city-wide regulatory framework for multi-tenant houses.
These regulations would be developed using a human rights lens thus “ensuring regulatory oversight to protect tenant life safety and create liveable, well-maintained and affordable places to live.”
This is good news. Hopefully new polices will be in place soon.
Meanwhile many in our province continue to live in perilous and dangerous conditions like those that I wrote about last year in Rupert Hotel December 1989*.
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Rupert Hotel December 1989*
Gordon was sorry
but it was tough keeping warm
and he’d had some to drink
so setting fire to those papers on the floor in the middle
of his second-floor room made some kind of sense.
At the Rupert Hotel, a three-storey brick walk up
in a licensed city rooming house
off Queen Street East
at Parliament
those with few options and few dollars could exist,
in a way.
Gordon’s warming fire soon leapt out of control
flames and choking smoke filling the corridors
as the fire gained full possession of the hallways.
The license pinned to the wall wasn’t worth the paper
it was printed on as far as the protection it afforded
the 31 tenants at the Rupert
on this wintry December night.
A sprinkler system might have halted the fire’s progress.
Perhaps tenants could have taken action
if the alarm system had been operable
or fire extinguishers stored in the basement were reachable.
It was 17 long minutes before someone called 911.
When firefighters arrived
the whole building was enveloped.
Flames leapt out of the top floor windows.
Firefighters using ladders forced their way
into the searing heat of the second floor.
Later a witness called it
“A Vision out of Hell.”
As the fire raged people screamed, crying out for friends.
It took six hours and eighteen crews to subdue the blaze.
Thankfully, some tenants were saved and many escaped.
For days crews chopped through ice and debris to locate bodies.
They found nine men.
A woman had returned to the building to help a friend
Donna Marie Cann died, as had the others,
of heavy smoke inhalation.
Soon an inquest was held.
Recommendations were made
new rules created
regulations established
housing planned.
After a while all was forgotten.
Rules and regulations lapsed,
were ignored or opposed
and the programs ended.
In the city today austerity policies
compel people to rent rooms
in perilous and dangerous buildings.
Many flee the downtown to illegal suburban homes
where life is cheaper.
*According to the Fire Marshal, there were fires at 69 illegal rooming houses in the Toronto area between 2013 and 2017.
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Rupert Hotel December 1989* was published earlier this year in Literature for the People (Editor Raymond Fenech) and received honourable mention in the Norfolk Literary Prize competition.
