The latest fire that killed a French mother and her seven-year-old daughter reminds us of the failure to get to the bottom of the previous blaze that killed seven.
What are the odds that two tragedies of epic proportions could repeat themselves in Montreal, with so many chilling similarities, just 18 months apart?
Waking up Friday morning to news of a five-alarm blaze overnight in a century-old building in Old Montreal was a flashback to the earlier disaster that shook the city. This time it was a youth hostel smouldering on the corner of Notre-Dame and Bonsecours Sts. In March 2023, it was an apartment complex converted into illegal Airbnbs at Place D’Youville a few blocks away.
The chances of so many sinister parallels and troubling coincidences must be infinitesimal. Unless, that is, we’ve failed to hold anyone to account for the previous tragedy, learned from earlier mistakes and heeded previous warnings. Since so much remains unresolved in the aftermath of 2023, it is clear this is less a case of déjà vu and more a chronicle of a tragedy foretold.
To be fair, the efforts to get to the bottom of the initial catastrophe are still playing out. That includes the police investigation, a coroner’s probe and various civil suits.
Legal proceedings take time to wind their way through the courts. However, other pressing matters remain unsettled.
The opposition also has serious qualms about the priorities of fire inspectors, who shut down restaurant terrasses on Peel St. during the opening night of the Grand Prix and gave a bar owner grief about the height of the plants on his patio in the Village this summer. The Montreal Fire Department had to rekindle its followup to fire-code infractions in the wake of the first Old Montreal fire after it was revealed in the media that there had been a four-year moratorium on investigations into properties that had been red-flagged.
The integrity, effectiveness and enforceability of the fire department’s prevention practices is all the more urgent now. The building on Notre Dame and Bonsecours Sts. was found to have safety violations in 2020. The issues were said to have been corrected.
But that comes as cold comfort to the latest survivors, the victims’ families — not to mention future visitors to this city and all Montrealers. How can anyone trust that the rooms they fall asleep in at night are safe?
Last Friday, 23 of the 25 people staying in the Hostel 402 mercifully made it out of the burning building, including two who were injured, one of whom was taken to a hospital in critical condition. A mother and her young daughter from France did not. Police have identified the pair as 43-year-old Léonor Geraudie and seven-year-old Vérane Reynaud-Geraudie.
But it should be branded into our collective consciousness as a reminder that after the litany of failures that contributed to the deaths of Sears, Camille Maheux, Dania Zafar, Saniya Khan, An Wu, Charlie Lacroix and Walid Belkahla in 2023, two more innocent people have been killed.
It’s hard to think of a more devastating blow to Montreal’s reputation as a welcoming city for tourists than a mother and child dying under such strange circumstances that are nevertheless frighteningly familiar.