Yes, I'm very aware of Fire Chief Garis's view on the subject. I would not disagree with the statement he made there, which was that once these buildings are made, their fire safety performance is equal. Where I think Mr. Garis and I would differ is with regard to his belief that somehow things will always remain the same.
I've spent a lot of time in high-rise buildings where we had fires, where all sorts of safety precautions were in effect that did not respond or do the job that they had originally been intended to do, in most cases because the occupants in those buildings had made modifications. Some modifications are actually done by building personnel unknowingly doing things that breach the code or that impact the ability of those protections to do what they're supposed to do. More often, it's individuals in a building who decide they want a new cable TV outlet in a bedroom, and they poke a hole through a wall, and now you have a possible breach of the fire protection that's there.
A lot of the wood-frame fire protection relies on using gypsum board and different things to wrap around the combustible materials to ensure that they meet the same kind of standard as other non-flammable materials do. Again, as someone who has spent a lot of time working in the industry, I think that's great, but I also think that there's a huge potential for modifications or vandalism or some other impact or thing to change the ability of that material to perform as it was intended to.
Again, the Grenfell fire in London is an example of how no one really anticipated that wrapping that building would have the impact it did. That's a building that was built with non-flammable materials. Again, I'm not suggesting that this bill would allow something like that to happen, but when you make major modifications to a building 20 or 30 years later, whether or not all the considerations of what was originally put into that building are being looked at when those modifications are being made, you're relying on a lot of different people doing the proper analysis of it. I'm talking about building code people, fire code people, fire inspectors, and fire prevention people. As I said, what we have seen, particularly in the city of Toronto, is that the minute they look at saving money in the city of Toronto, they cut fire inspection jobs, and they cut fire prevention jobs. Those are the people we're relying on to do that.