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In the foreword to her searing final report on the Grenfell Tower fire, released just in May, Dame Judith Hackitt was merciless.

She called a spade a spade and, in the bureaucratic chaos that directly led to that deadly fire and the deaths of so many people in London, she saw a lot of spades.

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A process for testing and licensing that was weak and woefully inadequate. A collective ennui. A lack of oversight. And a lack of freaking urgency.

It’s funny how there’s never any urgency about fire prevention until, well, there is, and then it’s too late.

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Beverly Romeo-Beehler is Toronto’s Dame Hackitt. She’s the city auditor-general. And her recent report on a fraud investigation that grew to become a stunning indictment of senior city staff and a shoddy and disreputable private contractor is scathing.

The investigation started with a complaint about a particular trio of companies, all with the same “directing mind” as it’s called, which had been getting city contracts for a decade to provide fire prevention and “life safety system” services in some of the thousands of buildings the city owns — despite a lousy record of performance and over the cries, complaints, protests and even desperate jokes of the city’s own staff, including a life safety inspector.