

Chris Fox, CP24.com





The former owners of the Waverly Hotel have pled guilty to a long list of fire code violations, including the absence of smoke alarms and the existence of excessive combustible materials in exits.

The charges all pertain to violations that were reported between 2013 and 2017 prior to the hotel on Spadina Avenue north of College Street being closed late last year and subsequently sold to a developer.

At the time of its closure, the Waverley Hotel had 63 rooms.

“This building remained occupied throughout this entire period and the owners for whatever reason chose not to fix the violations, which really upped the ante for Toronto Fire so we had to implement alternative measures,” Deputy Fire Chief Jim Jessop told CP24 on Thursday. “Had we had a fire in this building with these types of continued uncorrected violations there is no doubt in our mind there certainly would have been serious injuries if not fatalities.”

Jessop said that fire inspectors issued “numerous orders” to the operators of the hotel, instructing them to address the violations but found that those orders were ignored.

In response, he said that Toronto Fire Services staff were forced to take alternative measures, including actually installing smoke alarms in the building themselves and conducting weekly checks to look for additional violations.

“We started actually implementing alternative measures because we never want to de-house unless we have to,” he said. “It was about finding that balance between making sure they (resident) were safe, making sure our firefighters would be safe if they actually had to respond to this property and also trying to get compliance.”

On Wednesday, Jeffrey Wynn was fined $33,000 plus a 25 per cent victim fine surcharge and 2436196 Ontario Inc. was fined $153,500 plus a 25 per cent victim fine surcharge.

Jessop said that the fines are among the largest that he is aware of being handed out in Ontario in at least a few years.

“This was a guilty plea. Had we gone to trial there is no doubt that Toronto prosecutions would have asked for substantially higher penalties,” he said.

The charges that the former operators of the hotel pled guilty to were as follows: