Rupert Hotel Fire - 31 Years Ago

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.” 

You can read a report that talks about this process at http://app.toronto.ca/tmmis/viewAgendaItemHistory.do?item=2020.PH18.2 

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.

A Taxing Time

(An earlier version of this story appeared in the Sherman Hub News and North End Breezes.)

I’ll receive my municipal tax bill in the mail this week.

Just about everyone has an opinion on taxes, right?

Take President Donald Trump. On paying taxes Donald apparently doesn’t.  “That makes me smart," he said during a debate last year.

Others have funny ideas about tax avoidance.  “Dear IRS, I am writing to cancel my subscription. Please remove my name from your mailing list.” (Snoopy - aka Charles Schulz)

I’m partial to Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s adage:

“Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society.” 

In that context, most of us look for fairness in our tax systems.  What exactly “fairness” is remains subject to debate.  Indicators, though, should include simplicity, ability to pay and transparency.

That said, multi-residential property taxation in Hamilton fails the fairness test.

Today, there is a greater awareness by tenants that they pay taxes through their rent.   Ten years ago, the Clinic and community partners reached out through the I am a Tenant and I Vote Campaign to bring this reality to public attention.

At the time, tenant advocate Tom Cooper noted that many tenants were unaware that they were, in fact, paying much higher taxes than those in single family homes.

Writing in Raise the Hammer (https://raisethehammer.org/article/577/tenants_and_taxes), Cooper used real property to property comparisons.

Tenant tax rates were, in some cases, “three times higher than the 'residential property tax rate' their neighbors in the bungalow down the street are levied,” maintained Cooper.

More recently, Don McLean, co-founder and coordinator of Citizens at City Hall (CATCH), told a tenant’s conference that the tax rate on multi-residential units in Hamilton continued to be set at 2.74 times the rate on single-family homes.

“Tenants are effectively paying 20% of their rent in the form of municipal taxes,” said McLean in March 2016.

It is a fact that Hamilton is the one of the leaders in the dubious category of taxing tenants unfairly. While cities like Toronto have set out to address the disparity, Hamilton has turned a blind eye.

Finally, the province has taken note of this injustice and last year announced a review of the property taxation of multi‐residential apartment buildings. In April, they told municipalities that property taxes for new multi-residential apartment buildings must be charged at a similar rate as other residential properties.  It is thought that this will encourage developers to build more new purpose-built rental housing.  This is a good thing.

Meanwhile, some municipalities like Hamilton have had a freeze put on any increases in the property tax burden for multi-residential apartment buildings. The freeze is in place while the issue is studied.

Let’s see what happens.  Tenants have been waiting a long time for fairness. 

Ontario Government to Help Tenants - But Hold on a Minute

(This story originally appeared in July at www.hamiltonjustice.ca)

This looks like a classic case of government responding to an interest group at the expense of the broader public interest.

We are talking about the consultation paper recently put out by the provincial government.  The paper is called Consultation Paper on Proposals to Encourage Small Landlords to Provide Rental Housing.

This paper purports to be looking for input to improve the Ontario Government’s Long Term Affordable Housing Strategy (LTAHS).

The government has floated a bunch of ideas.  They claim these changes would help small landlords create more housing and address barriers that these potential affordable housing creators face.

Unfortunately, these ideas, if implemented, would “contribute to further homelessness and erode hard-won tenant protections.”

That is the opinion expressed by the Advocacy Centre for Tenants of Ontario (ACTO.)  ACTO is a legal clinic which works to better the housing situation of Ontario residents who have low incomes including tenants, co-op members and people who are homeless.  ACTO put together a forceful submission to the Ministry of Housing. A few examples of the kind of ideas floated in the paper and ACTO’s responses follows.

Ministry Idea:      
Require tenants to disclose any issues that they intend to raise at rental eviction hearings prior to the hearing.

ACTO Response:  
This proposal would bring back procedural barriers to justice for tenants.

Ministry Idea:      
Allow landlords and tenants to file the unsworn statements in support of  applications and motions, rather than affidavits.                                  

ACTO Response:
Clearly the impetus for this proposal is a desire to expedite landlords’ eviction applications.              

Ministry Idea:  
Explore whether any changes should be made to the process for appealing  decisions of the Landlord and Tenant Board (LTB) to Divisional Court.

ACTO Response:
Based on the widely–reported actions of a few criminals, landlord organizations are attempting to limit the effectiveness of the Superior Court’s supervision of the LTB by making it even more difficult than it already is for tenants to exercise these important and rarely-used appeal rights.                                                            

So, you’ll get the idea from these brief excerpts that the government’s proposals will be of no help to tenants.  And one other thing we should mention is this.  By and large the proposed changes would apply to most tenants not just those renting from small landlords.  

You can read ACTO’s full submission at https://1drv.ms/b/s!AvRzOEPfSVfDk3a5u5WgjoU8Rgff